I FIRST MET DAVIS IN MOAB, UTAH, at the home she shares with Potter and their dog, a ten-year-old heeler mix named Fletcher. They've lived in Moab on and off for the past six years, but they're rarely around. They spend the summer and fall free-climbing in Yosemite, where they own a couple of empty lots and plan to build a house. Come winter, they're usually off on an alpine expedition in the Andes. Davis is accustomed to the nomadic lifestyle—during her long climbing apprenticeship, she lived out of her car for seven years—but Moab is where she comes to escape what she calls the "penury and suffering" of climbing and go into serious nesting mode.

It was a hot desert day, and we'd spent the past 24 hours doing the things a pro climber does when she's not on the rock: trail-running, monkeying around on her homemade climbing wall, balancing on a slackline strung up in the front yard. We were just back from a hike through shin-deep snow in the La Sal Mountains and were sitting barefoot on the front steps, trying to relax.

Actually, I was trying to relax. Davis was busy rigging a drip hose to her potted pansies—"I simply cannot go to Yosemite until I fix my irrigation!" she declared—while debating how best to fix the trim around her front door with Ole Hougan, her sixty-something handyman. From the street, Davis's squat one-story house looks snug and homey. Closer inspection reveals that the charming little cottage is, in fact, a double-wide mobile home.

"You know, when you live in a trailer, it really keeps you honest," she said with a grin. "You should not have any kind of mess that doesn't look good. Immediately, it's trashy!"

Davis is preternaturally cheerful, prone to enthusiastic outbursts and an emphatic way of talking that sounds like shouting, only not as loud. At five foot five and 120 pounds, she's lean and strong, with olive skin, quizzical eyebrows, boyish calves, and the energy of a coiled-up spring waiting to pop.

Inside the trailer, the first thing you notice is the ivory upright piano. Polished to a sheen and surrounded by oddball castoffs—a giant, flying-saucer-shaped wicker chair, a defunct woodstove—it glistens like a wedding limo. "At first I thought, I just cannot have a white piano," said Davis, who bought it used two years ago. "But it had a nice sound, and I figured it would match the off-white carpeting and walls. It's so my trailer!"

To understand who Davis is, it's helpful to consider the piano. Her mother, Connie, enrolled her in lessons when she was four, hoping to instill an appreciation for music and a sense of purpose. It worked. By the time Davis was in high school in Columbia, Maryland, she was practicing classical piano six hours a day and bringing home straight A's. She was talented and focused but no prodigy, and it was understood that music was a means to an end—and the end was self-discipline.

"We never pushed Stephanie into anything, but we were academically inclined," says Connie, who now lives near Tucson with Steph's father, Virgil, a retired aerospace executive. "I just assumed she would go to college, get her law degree, and stay in a job forever."

But Davis had other ideas. In the spring of 1991, during her freshman year at the University of Maryland, a guy she barely knew offered to take her rock climbing. She was instantly hooked. She gave up piano, exchanged for a year to Colorado State to be closer to the mountains, and then went back to Colorado after graduation to pursue a master's in English literature. She climbed in her spare time: alpine routes on Longs Peak, in Rocky Mountain National Park, and bouldering trips to Hueco Tanks, in Texas. In September 1995, she enrolled in law school at the University of Colorado in Boulder, even though she didn't want to go. A week later, she quit school for good.

Within a month, she'd built a bed in the backseat of her grandmother's hand-me-down Cutlass Sierra and begun driving to climbing areas, waiting tables for cash. "It was a big shock," says Connie. "We were just a regular family—climbing wasn't something we could relate to, and Virgil and I weren't going to enable her. She needed to find out what it was really like. She did it by herself, with no help from us."

Through it all, Davis remained her geeky, systematic self. Though she made about $6,000 a year, she managed to open an IRA. She read constantly—everything from Gabriel García Márquez to Kirstie Alley's autobiography ("That was embarrassing," she admits) to French short stories she translated herself. But she never felt settled. "I was scared all the time," she recalls. "My parents did not like my choices and thought I was doing stupid things with my life, and they told me so. I didn't feel like anyone cared if I did a climb I was proud of. They were just like, ‘Great. What about your future schooling?' "

She labored for years, trying and failing on tough western rock routes like Pink Flamingo, a "really stout, horrible" 5.13b crack at Indian Creek, south of Moab, which she abandoned right away. "I thought if I couldn't do a climb after two or three tries, I wasn't good enough," she says. "And then when I did do one, I thought it was a fluke."

"Steph wasn't the most supertalented at the beginning," Potter agrees. "But she always kept pushing."

Which brings us to the other thing you notice in Davis's trailer: a handwritten quote, taped to the refrigerator at eye level, that reads, STRUGGLE IS PART OF LIFE, AND ONCE WE ACCEPT THAT, THINGS WILL BE MUCH EASIER.