ON AN OVERCAST SATURDAY in June, six weeks after I visited Davis in Moab, she and I were stuck in traffic in Yosemite Valley, sucking bus fumes on a one-way stretch of road between El Cap and Camp 4, the park's infamous climber hangout.

"This friggin' sucks," Davis said.

I'd come to Yosemite to hang out with Davis at the apartment she and Potter rent in Yosemite West, a small pocket of private land just inside the park's southwest boundary. She was just starting to train for the Salathé, and in the few days I'd been there, we hadn't seen Dean very much. One night he cooked us dinner, but otherwise he was gone, meeting friends, dawn-patrolling on El Cap, and scouting for places to rig his highline—a glorified slackline strung a thousand feet off the ground.

We were on our own program anyway: hiking, bouldering, waking up at 5 a.m. to climb the Snake Dike, a slabby 5.6 route up Half Dome's southwest face. When we weren't climbing, we were cruising, a very un-Davis-like activity that entails driving aimlessly around the

"You don't just walk up to El Cap and say, ‘I'm going to free it,' " Davis says. "It's like playing piano: taking a thing so big, breaking it down, and then trying to achieve a perfect performance."

Valley, with Fletcher up front and climbing gear jammed in the back. A typical Davis cruise involves a stop at the post office and a detour next door to the backcountry-permits office, where her friend Laurie Stowe works. At any time during the spring and fall climbing seasons, there might be a dozen top climbers in the park, and tracking them down usually means driving until you find them.

Sometimes it happens the other way around. One day, while we were checking out the land Davis and Potter own—two steep, pine-needly parcels surrounded by oversize vacation homes—a guy in a two-door rental car pulled up beside us. A tiny woman with fluffy blond hair was folded up in the backseat next to a fussing child. It was Lynn Hill, her then-partner, Brad Lynch, and their two-year-old son, Owen, driving by for a visit.

Hill is still the most famous female climber in history; her one-day free ascent of the Nose—the classic 5.14 route up El Cap's prominent center line—stood unmatched for 11 years, until 27-year-old Tommy Caldwell became the second person to do it, last October. Now she's a sponsored Patagonia athlete who runs her own climbing camp and flies out from Boulder occasionally to see old Yosemite buddies.

"Owen got devoured by mosquitoes," Hill explained, craning her neck forward to talk to us. It was starting to drizzle, but that didn't stop Davis from launching into an animated monologue about organic bug repellent and her second-favorite topic after climbing: the weather. A few minutes later, Hill and Lynch waved and pulled away into the rain.

Davis's big break as a pro came in 1998, when Patagonia hired her as its first female "climbing ambassador" to promote its products in exchange for free gear, a paycheck, and the validation she craved. "When Patagonia said, ‘We admire your climbing achievements and we support you,' it was like they were playing the role my parents never did," said Davis. "Their support of my passion—even more than the financial support—means everything to me." These days, she's paid to travel the world doing what she loves—training and climbing, and occasionally pitching in to help Patagonia with product development and planning.

But there's one small hitch. Since joining Patagonia, she's had to reconcile her belief that climbing is a "pure path of spiritual joy" with the fact that it's also a business. "To be a professional climber, you have to sell yourself and convince everybody you're the best," Davis says. "But I don't think there is a 'best.' The minute you say you want to be better than someone else, you've immediately put a limit on yourself, and you're a fool!"

Not everyone in the rock world buys her humility. Some grouse that she's a self-promoter who doesn't have the skills to back it up. "You can't even mention her in the same sentence as Beth Rodden," snipes one climber, who refuses to be named for fear of jeopardizing his own sponsorship.

Rodden herself doesn't mind the comparison. "The women's El Cap free-climbing scene is pretty small—just Steph and me," she says. "And even then, Tommy and I have each other to belay through the hard pitches, but Steph does it alone."

Others wave off the negativity as mere cattiness. "Pro climbers can be easy targets," explains adventure photographer Jimmy Chin, who climbed Pakistan's Tahir Tower with Davis in 2000. "Climbers will talk shit about them any day, but it's possible to balance the exposure with the climbing, to keep your soul and work for a company."

At least for now, Davis agrees. "Yes, I have negative feelings about marketing myself, but this is my job and my life, and I love it!" she says. "I don't want to be the best; I just want to be better—that might mean being a better climber, having better style or a better attitude, or being better to the earth, to people, to creatures. And there's no limit to that."