AT FIRST GLANCE, Steve House doesn't fit the image of a super-alpinist. At five foot ten and 165 pounds, with rounded, sloping shoulders, he's not particularly imposing. His dark, darting eyes can sometimes give him a look of feral intensity, but his manner is friendly and down-home, sometimes even shy. One of his early mentors and climbing partners, Canadian alpinist Barry Blanchard, calls House "Farm Boy," because, as Blanchard once wrote, he "looks like he should be chewing on a stalk of straw and slicing into his mom's fresh apple pie."

Yet over the past decade, while much of the public's attention has been focused on the cattle route up Everest, House has pursued a completely different kind of climbing, stringing together steep mixed pitches of rock, ice, and snow in head-spinningly

More recently House has aimed his cannon at an initiative led by St. Petersburg–based Alexander Odintsov to conquer the world's biggest unclimbed walls in classic siege style. "They're going to wreck them for the rest of us," He says. "It makes me sick to think about it."

fast times, even at very high altitude. In 2001, for example, climbing in the Alaska Range with Boulder, Colorado's Rolando Garibotti, he summited one of North America's hardest routes—the 9,000-foot line on Mount Foraker's Infinite Spur—in just 25 hours, more than six days faster than the previous time. That same year, as an "experiment," he raced up and down an 8,000-meter peak, Tibet's Cho Oyu, in less than a day.

There's one other thing that sets House apart: his tongue. In recent years he's made a name for himself as America's leading advocate for alpine-style climbing—and as a relentless critic of anyone who doesn't climb that way. House doesn't just practice alpinism; he preaches it—on both environmental and personal grounds.

"There is and should be repulsion at the idea that people leave camps and ropes and trash in the wilderness and permanently deface the rock by bolting it," he says. "It trashes the resource and changes the experience of everyone who comes after."

Another of House's arguments is harder to articulate, but it's just as strongly felt. "I need another word, but there's a moral or ethical element here," he told me in Pakistan. "Climbing is a form of expression that has no practical purpose—it's for one's own personal satisfaction. So to climb in a manner that is not what I call moral is to diminish your own experience. We already know we can climb any route with enough technology. So what's the point? That's not interesting. Uncertainty is the most important aspect."

One of House's first public salvos about all this came in 2000, when The American Alpine Journal—an annual compendium of "the world's most significant climbs" put out by the American Alpine Club—published an essay in which he decried "business climbing." He singled out a commercially sponsored expedition to Pakistan's Great Trango Tower, made the year before by Mark Synnott, Jared Ogden, and the late Alex Lowe, in which the three, accompanied by a camera team, sent out regular Web broadcasts from their portaledge. Besides "degrading" the caliber of the climbing, he railed, any climbs that rely on bolts and fixed lines, as this one did, "do not stretch our collective experience any more."

House has kept up the debate ever since. More recently he's aimed his cannon at the Russian Big Wall Project, a ten-year initiative led by St. Petersburg–based Alexander Odintsov to conquer the world's biggest unclimbed walls in classic siege style. "They've got some incredible things on their list—the west face of Makalu, the west face of K2—and they're going to wreck them for the rest of us," House says. "It makes me sick to think about it."

House's biggest outburst to date occurred at the 2005 Piolet d'Or, or "Golden Ice Ax," an annual Oscar-style awards show in Grenoble, France, put on by the French magazine Montagnes to recognize the greatest alpine-climbing feat of the preceding year. Not surprisingly, House had been nominated for his 2004 solo effort on K7, a 22,776-foot peak in northern Pakistan, until then climbed just once. House had ascended it, via a new route, in one sleepless 41-hour push. To his consternation, however, among the other five nominees was a 12-member Russian expedition that had scaled the north face of 25,295-foot Jannu, a sheer wall in Nepal considered one of the climbing world's "last great problems." House objected to the way the Russians had sieged their route, the dozens of bolts they'd drilled, and the fact that they'd left most of their gear (including 77 ropes) hanging on the mountain. When they won the award, he stormed off the stage.

That performance drew its own catcalls. "I really think people like Steve miss the boat of public appeal and interest with the dogmatic approach," says Kelly Cordes, 38, a Colorado climber and a senior editor at The American Alpine Journal. "His climbing speaks so loudly that, it could be argued, his bantering actually weakens his cause. Many people view it as a pissing match, and they've got a point."

In a 2005 article in Climbing, Synnott defended the Russian approach as a bold effort by determined climbers who were coming out of a different, communitarian tradition. "There exists a category of people with a firm knowledge of how one is supposed to live," Odintsov, the Jannu expedition's leader, told Synnott, in an obvious reference to House. "To them, it's absolutely necessary that everyone around them live life by their patterns."

"In alpinism, if you take ethics away, there's nothing on the other side—only helicopters," counters Marko Prezelj, a Slovenian climber and frequent expedition partner of House's. "If you're not harsh, nobody listens."

Even those who share House's views have been taken aback by his apparent willingness to sacrifice everything, even friendship, to make a point—as he did last year when he seemed to attack Bruce Miller, his partner on the 2004 Rupal Face climb. In an account he wrote in the spring 2005 issue of Alpinist, the bible of the hardcore mountaineering crowd, House said it's impossible to know what might have happened if the two had kept going. "It would have been the greatest accomplishment of my life. But I had to go down with Bruce because his no was necessarily stronger than my yes," he wrote. "Bruce had acted on fear... At 7,650 meters, Bruce's overriding fear had become me, become my death."

House still thinks the climb could have succeeded. "I believe [Miller] believes that we needed to go down," he told me in Pakistan. "I think it's a possibility. But, really, I don't believe it. We'd done 300 meters in three hours, and we were 600 meters from the top—that's my answer."

Not everyone agrees, including a friend of both climbers who asked not to be named but clearly thinks Miller did the right thing. "Look at the pictures from that trip," this person wrote in an e-mail. "Steve's head is swollen like a watermelon... When Steve dissed Bruce in that article, it REALLY put off a lot of people. Frankly, Bruce saved Steve's life—I remember Bruce telling me that Steve admitted that he was willing to die for the route. (Bruce, so low-key, told me, 'Well, I thought to myself, Ya know, that might be OK for you, but it's really not alright by me.')"

Miller was more circumspect when I reached him by phone. "On day four, this lung crud started to catch up with him," he said. "By the last day it was pretty clear to me, and I felt like I had to make a call. I thought my partner was dying." He paused. "I thought it was weird, that account he wrote. Let me put it this way: I need all my fingers and probably a couple of toes to count my friends who I don't have anymore, who I wish were alive to give me shit."