Rock climbers are a breed apart. Scaling the faces of sheer cliffs--sometimes thousands of feet high--enthusiasts are hooked on the beauty, the exhilaration and the challenge.

YOSEMITE VALLEY — Three rock rats fresh from a cold campground commune with their coffee in the Yosemite Lodge cafeteria, drawing warmth as lizards do from the morning sun.

They peer at a map and point to the Nose, the Zodiac and the Shield--paths up the face of El Capitan, the 3,000-foot-high granite wall that is a marker for climbers worldwide--debating the alternatives the way Angelenos choose among exits on the San Diego Freeway.

Elsewhere in Yosemite Valley on this spring morning, climbers hang from rock walls. Some cling to the sheer face of noble El Cap, having just passed the chilly night during an ascent that typically takes three to seven days.

A very few make it “over the top” of this legendary rock in a day or less. Canadian climber Peter Croft, 38, and his partner, American Hans Florine, 32, hold the record, climbing it in just under 4 1/2 hours in 1992. Others have died on the wall when equipment failure or the Sierra’s fickle weather caught them unprepared.

“You see the rock and you go. It is there, and you do it,” is the way Werner Braun describes his three-decade-long passion. Braun, 48, has lived year-round in this valley since 1979, where he works for the search and rescue team.

“People get attracted to climbing for an infinite number of reasons,” explains the wiry man, who earned the label “Astroman” with his rapid-fire assaults up 1,900-foot Washington Column. “Climbing is kind of a crazy sport.”

Day climber or big-wall enthusiast, participants say they take to it to test themselves and meet people. They talk about the exhilaration, the escape, the beauty of being close to the rock, the incredible views, the poetry of motion tasked to solving a physical and mental problem.

Golf, too, takes all day, but climbing requires a different kind of devotion. Men dominate the sport. Women, though, are among its top performers and are more and more common among recreational climbers.

Climbing is in a boom now with explosive growth in the last five years. Mark Bowling, who runs the climbing school in Joshua Tree National Park, largely credits the rock gym craze of recent years.

Regardless, the sport still has a secret-handshake quality. It is not something you pick up at the schoolyard, follow on TV or learn on a sunny Sunday at the park with Dad. And while more people are drawn to it, there are only a few who put climbing first. Everything else--love, work, even shelter--runs a sad second. You can find them, and others less driven, at climbing spots around the country but the mecca remains Yosemite.

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The sun is just beginning to light the southeast face of El Capitan. The Salathe Wall, the one around the corner, is still in cold shadow. Tiny traces of mist rise from the rock in a few places. A peregrine falcon cries way over head.

Up before dawn, Mike Davis, 35, of Lake Tahoe and climbing partner Todd Burks, 27, of Mammoth Lakes are trying to get eyeball to eyeball with the falcon. Already hundreds of feet up the southwest facing wall, the duo plans to top out in two days on a route called Triple Direct.

For Davis, a registered nurse, climbing is the primary love. More than a few relationships have foundered on these shoals.

“At first, you meet a woman and they think it is a great romantic thing to climb mountains and rocks,” he said. “And then, when they find out it is something to compete with, it wears on the relationship quite a bit.”

Davis caught the bug in Tahoe, lived in Yosemite for a few years and has completely dedicated his life to the sport. He went straight to climbing and skiing out of high school--putting off college until 30. “Going to college and becoming a nurse was a way to sustain climbing,” he said, explaining that living out of a truck or tent had gotten old.

Climbing, he said, is “a gut check” and “a terror magnet” where the “rewards are the biggest there are.” He has been to the top of El Capitan 12 times and said that it often isn’t even fun.

“But when you pull yourself over the top of a wall, then making your car insurance payment seems so small,” he said, seated earlier next to his car, which bulges with $5,000 worth of climbing gear. “It gets existence down to a few basic things. [During a big-wall climb,] the greatest thing in the world will be a glass of water.”

Burks, who has worked as a Spanish and ceramics teacher and as a cook, has the climbing jones. “I plan my life and my work so I can support my climbing habit,” he said. “That’s why I teach in the winter and work in the resorts.”

He has been up El Cap twice. Like many other big-wall climbers, his approach is single-minded. This dedication is “an extension of the work ethic” learned from his family while growing up in the Silicon Valley, he explained.

“But it is focused in a different manner,” he said as he prepared burritos out of the back of Davis’ car. “I just don’t get the same charge or passion from work. I am getting better [at climbing] and my goals are getting greater.”

He talked about watching a couple tossing a Frisbee in Leidig Meadow. “Wouldn’t it be easy to just do Frisbee, if that is what floated your boat?” he mused. Regrettably, he said, nothing that simple touches his soul.

As Davis and Burks climb, the sun rises higher; the ochres, pinks and grays of the granite light up. A two-third moon is setting. Water rushing off Ribbon Fall adds its tones to the sounds of canyon wrens and Steller’s jays.

Davis and Burks plan a quick, lightly equipped assault of the wall. Nearby, Brian Biega, 25, of Lake Tahoe stands at the base of El Cap assisting his friend and climbing partner, Scott Thelin, 14, of Truckee who is 60 feet up.

For the past eight years, Biega has been climbing four or five times a week, honing skills he needs to be a climbing guide. He wants to live a comfortable life in the mountains.

“A lot of people in Yosemite are collecting bottles, doing whatever, to make ends meet so they can climb,” he said. Instead of that, Biega has worked a world of odd jobs to support his climbing addiction and reach that grander vision.

Two years ago, he was hired as a guide for a mountaineering firm in Norden. Right now, Biega rents a room in a friend’s house. He eventually wants his own.

While Biega talks, Thelin keeps climbing. After 30 minutes he comes to a resting spot some 100 feet up. The teenager ties himself onto the wall, then gestures to Biega. Five minutes later, Biega is alongside.

“The view is pretty sweet,” he yelled down. “You can see the meadow and Cathedral [Rocks] and the moon. One of the beautiful things about the valley is you can’t see the roads from above.”

Biega has climbed El Cap 10 times. If all goes well, the two expect to top out in five or six days. The weather, however, doesn’t cooperate, and both pairs of climbers are forced off the wall the next day.

“It looms over you,” said Burks of the failure in a phone call from Mammoth a few weeks later. “When you are so goal-oriented, if you have to come down, you want to go back as soon as possible.”

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In its basic form, what climbers do is pretty simple. Two people climb as a team, tethered together by a rope tied securely to safety harnesses worn around the pelvis. The leader has the tougher task, moving up the wall while fastening safety devices, called “protection,” into cracks or other places.

The rope is secured through the safety devices. If the leader falls, the partner can stop--or belay--the leader’s descent at the previous protection by tightening the rope. If the leader has climbed 5 feet above his last piece of protection, he will fall that 5 feet plus 5 more, assuming of course that the previous protection is secure.

It costs as little as $300--the price of a good pair of shoes and a harness--to get started.

Big-wall climbers should be in top condition. But as a recreational sport, it does not require extraordinary physical gifts other than a large sense of adventure. You move upward using a combination of technique, strength and agility.

“It is more about technique and balance than strength,” says Bruce Brossman, 44, who heads the Yosemite Mountaineering School. “That is why women can excel in the sport.”

And it is about concentration. While many sports combine the physical and the mental--pitching is said to be cerebral--climbing requires using your body to solve this puzzle: How do I get up there from here? Nothing focuses the mind like hanging several hundred feet in the air while trying to figure out how to gain the next 2 feet and get to the next ledge.

Some coaches talk about thinking twice and moving once. Merrie Braun, 38, who is married to Werner, describes it as close to a ballet, with your “mind envisioning what you want to do and then your body doing it.”

Perhaps the key thing is controlling your emotions. The rope should hold you, so eventually you get to the place where you trust your equipment and your partner. Then the real challenge is trusting yourself and finding your relationship to the rock.

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In Yosemite, you find all kinds of devotees playing around on the rock walls.

Some live and work here. Others support themselves with work outside the park. The rock rats--mostly young men--live at the Sunnyside Campground or out of their cars. And there are the occasional recreational climbers.

Dr. John Donlou, 51, is a psychiatrist in Torrance who climbs several times a year in Tuolomne Meadows. He sees the sport as a metaphor for life.

“Climbing is redirecting fear into action,” he says. “If we look back from where we started, fear can overwhelm us. If we look forward to where we want to go, it’s easy to doubt ourselves. If we relax and deal with where we are and what we need to do to move on, before we know it we’ve reached our goal.”

Donlou should know. He lost an arm in 1979 while ice climbing on Mt. Ranier. It was 1985 before he returned to the rock in Tuolomne at the urging of his friend Brossman. Donlou doesn’t wear a prosthesis but climbs using his own unique style.

Ken Wood, 27, is an ex-sailor who arrived in Yosemite four years ago, got a job and then found climbing. He calls it cheap entertainment and a good way to make friends.

“Once you meet someone and you take them climbing, it furthers that relationship dramatically,” he says. “It lets you see the best and the worst of people quickly. There’s no better place to have a conversation than on a ledge.”

One of the park’s most famous rock men is Mike Corbett, 43. He has made 50 ascents of El Capitan and seven of Half Dome, and is best known for leading Mark Wellman, a paraplegic and former ranger, up the face of both cliffs.

“It is one of those sports where you can combine the mental and the physical into something of beauty,” he says on a sunny spring afternoon. “The overall atmosphere is a little enchanted. You are connecting with your partner.”

Corbett, who has slept 187 nights on El Capitan, has a Peter Pan quality. The sport too seems to create its own Lost Boys.

Corbett acknowledges as much as he talks about its seductive nature, the magical settings, the friendships fostered and “the way it makes you feel special.” “Climbing is a way of not having to grow up,” he volunteers.

“It can be so sublime,” he says later, his blue eyes shining as he takes a break from advising tourists where to find lunch or the trail head at Happy Isles. “And one second later, it can be your worst nightmare--you drop your haul bag or something pulls out of the wall and you fall. These things happen in a second: The leader falls and hits his head and your partner is bleeding to death.”

Corbett readily admits that the sport grabbed him from his first climb, “then evolved into an obsession about climbing El Capitan and living on the vertical walls. People used to joke that I should change my address to General Delivery, El Capitan.”

All that, however, has been tempered by the need to provide for his 5-year-old daughter, Ellie, who just got her second pair of climbing shoes. Corbett, who’s divorced, now climbs at most once or twice a month while lecturing and doing public relations work for Yosemite Park Concession Services Co.

“After a while, it got old and I started to want other things; a room not a tent, more stability with girlfriends and security,” he says. “I went from a serious, obsessed, avid climber to a dad who can only afford to be a recreational climber.”