Beginners and moderate climbers flock to The Feathers, a series of short, well-protected bolted climbs that tower above the camping area at Frenchman Coulee. This is the most accessible of the climbing spots, and many - though not all - are among the area's easiest climbs.

	Bill Robins takes a break before belaying his partner up a crack. Climbers can and do ascend many of the pillars stacked behind him.

On a cold winter day, he tramped across a high sage plateau and rappelled like a Marine down one of the ancient basalt columns that define this desolate stretch of red-rock hills in Eastern Washington. He had a drill, and every few feet he used it to yank a ring-shaped metal anchor from the stone. He moved from column to column, swiping a hundred or more anchors before slipping into the night.

No bigger than good skipping stones, these bolts, as they are called, were put there by rock climbers to hold the ropes that help keep them from somersaulting to the ground. The theft wasn't a hazard — anyone could see the bolts were missing — but their absence meant that climbers had no safe way to navigate some of the most popular cliffs around.

To the rock jocks who haunt these arid crags, the crime was a sacrilege akin to pulling stones off the Sphinx. And to many, a motive was painfully clear. At a time when the future of this haven demanded they be unified, one among them was sending a message: "This place is too crowded. Scram. Go home."

In casting for villains, many latched onto a single suspect, a fanatical climber with the heart of a purist — a renegade who happens to have a very big mouth.

IT'S A BLUE-SKY day along a U-shaped band of pillars, a sandpaper landscape pocked and fissured like Mars. Forty feet up these towers of rock hangs Terry Martin, her hand jammed to the wrist in a crack the width of a guitar neck. Her feet pinwheel for purchase against the cliff face. Suddenly she kicks free ashtray-sized rocks, sending onlookers scattering off the trail below.

There, an unflinching general amid the shelling, stands Bill Robins, the Renegade, belting out an odd raunchy ditty. Untouched and untroubled as the missiles detonate around him, he pauses only a moment before launching into a running dissertation on why he and climbers like him are jerks.

"It's not a team sport," he's saying. Above, Martin, his partner for the day, hoists herself over the ridge to safety. "To be good you have to be arrogant," he continues. "You have to believe in yourself." If you doubt, you could screw up, he says in words not meant for polite company. "You could die."

In the days of North Face chic, here is Robins, head to toe: white cap with Lawrence-of-Arabia neck rag; thick, wrap-around shades; white painter pants hand-drawn with aliens; argyle socks beneath aging climbing shoes. Combined with a voice that carries easily over wind, everything about him screams: "Loud!"

Terry Martin, Robins' occasional partner, leads a crack climb along Sunshine Wall.

He's climbed routes in Yosemite, Utah and Canada. He was part of a team two years ago that helped paraplegic climber Pete Rieke up Mount Rainier. This summer he'll head to the mountains of South America. But mostly Robins can be found here at Frenchman Coulee, which he knows as well as most of us know our own living rooms.

From his place on the trail, Robins feeds his partner's rope through his harness and begins to lace a figure-eight knot. He's preparing to follow her line up the rock when something flickers to his right. Bearing down fast is a bulky man with a beard, a furnace with legs, red-faced and marching. Earlier that morning the two almost came to blows, the man thumping a finger into Robins' chest.

Now the man pulls close enough to smell the Gatorade on Robins' breath. "Hello, buttface," he spits, and moves on down the trail.

Robins sniffs, his head cocked slightly, and smiles: "Could have been worse."

YOU FIND Frenchman Coulee not far from where the Columbia River floats wide and slow past the tiny hamlet of Vantage.

Carved 12,000 or more years ago, the coulee was formed when massive ice dams broke and swept floods across the Columbia Plateau, pouring water over these old basalt layers in mammoth falls. It spilled into huge plunge pools and gnawed back under hardened lava, crumbling layer after layer until it formed these horseshoe-shaped cliffs.

These perfectly vertical pillars have attracted a few climbers since at least World War II, but Robins and his partners have been coming since the mid-'80s, when most here still knew one another's names.

Now climbers come in hordes, hundreds each weekend, from Seattle and Spokane and burgs in between. They bring barking dogs and Red Bull, bongos and blaring Zeppelin. They form lines at easy routes as if ordering at Burger King. People do what they like and a few go — literally — where they want. Scraps of toilet paper wave from unlucky sage branches like tiny eroding flags of surrender.

	It's not uncommon for climbers at the coulee to spend an entire day ascending faces within an arm's reach of other climbers.

This place has been discovered, and not just by climbers. There's been a rave near cliff tops. Concert-goers camp here before shows nearby at The Gorge. Last fall on "OzzFest" weekend someone dragged one of two Port-a-potties over a cliff. (Climbers dragged it back and tried to pound out the dents.)

State game managers worry about ravens and prairie falcons and five species of bat, and suggest use here can't continue unchecked. Climbers want to save it, because even with vast mountains and volcanoes all around, there's still no place like it. They've done cleanups and trail maintenance, and tried to make climbs safer.

But some see differences about who and what pose the threat. And unifying such go-it-aloners can be like corralling wild horses. Bill Robins, in particular, is known for taking matters into his own hands. Someone even scrawled "Osama Bill Robins" on a trail sign. This is a man who once road his horse through a school hallway — and who has admitted destroying other climbing routes he didn't think belonged.

TO UNDERSTAND the conflict one must understand this sport's peculiar culture.

Though some of the same skills are involved, rock climbing is not the same as mountain climbing. Rock climbing's often more like ballet, requiring delicacy and flexibility as much as balance and brute power. It's about understanding a body's limits, and knowing precisely when to push them.

There's a mythology about rock climbers, too, that they're ice-jawed adventurers, swashbuckling free spirits driven by exploration. It's a stereotype that sprung out of 1960s California, when the granite monuments of Yosemite Valley drew dirtbags and dropouts part beatnik, part Hell's Angel. Many were anarchistic social misfits who siphoned gas from park visitors and finished meals abandoned by tourists. But the sport also drew those who didn't fit in elsewhere, allowing them to turn inward toward something requiring relentless concentration.

Some climbers are daredevils who trade risk for purity, much like mountaineers who'll scale Everest only without oxygen. Some crave heights and great views while others are waif-like vertical dancers. Some are drawn to the sport's simplicity, advancing from easy grades to hard, appreciating the uncomplicated success of moving in ways they couldn't yesterday. "I'm scared to go up a ladder, but as soon as I put on a rope, I think I can push myself," says Jim Yoder, who authored the area's climbing guide.

The "live to climb" tradition was the gold standard until the 1990s, when this eccentric sport suddenly became fashionable. Then there were X-Games and climbing gyms popping up in Kansas, and Gore-Tex and fleece grew trendy as Grunge. Now church groups and college kids and weekend athletes are climbers, mingling as normally as 9-to-5ers play softball.

But this is a sport where some debate technique and ethics with the devout intensity of monks.

"Climbing is such a weird activity, and such a weird subculture that unless you know it from the inside, it's hard to understand the distinction climbers draw amongst themselves," says Andy Fitz, who works with the Access Fund to help maintain climbing spots. And those distinctions can be seen in the two most common ways people climb.

		'Climbing is such a weird activity, and such a weird subculture that unless you know it from the inside, it's hard to understand the distinction climbers draw amongst themselves.' Andy Fitz

A sport climber tackles sheer faces using those metal bolts for security. He or she takes off from the ground where a "belayer" remains and holds the rope, feeding it out as the climber dances up pencil-thin ledges. Every few feet the climber clips the rope to one of the bolts someone long ago drilled into the rock. Should the climber slip, the belayer locks the rope tight, arresting the fall.

A traditional climber typically scales long, vertical cracks, where there are no bolts and rarely nice ledges. These climbers jam hands and feet into splits in the rock, every once in awhile stuffing a removable metal plug into the fracture. Instead of clipping into permanent bolts, they clip their ropes into the removable gear and hope it stays put if they fall. At the top the climber then becomes the belayer, and the partner below ascends the same route, taking out the metal supports along the way.

In what Freud might have dismissed as "the narcissism of small differences," some traditional climbers eschew bolted faces altogether, suggesting such routes soil the experience, limit the thrill, and attract more climbers. These issues help explain why disappearing bolts can stir up such a stew: Many new climbers have learned to ascend only bolted faces. Eliminating those bolts might just drive the newcomers away.

ON A WEB SITE he dedicates to climbing at Frenchman Coulee, Robins reveals the perversity he sees in some bolted climbing routes. It's a picture of a raccoon mounting a beagle.

Robins is a traditionalist who scales mostly cracks, and loves scaring himself silly puzzling out routes no one's done. No great evidence has surfaced linking him to The Case of the Missing Bolts, but in its absence, climbers point to his temperament.

By day he's a chemist at a lab associated with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but what he actually lives for is to climb. "If I go two weeks without climbing, I get antsy and depressed and my temper gets short," he says. "It's adrenaline withdrawal. In a perfect world, this is what I would do all day, every day."

Now 44, he's been climbing since age 17, when he first met another rock climber surrounded by a bevy of pretty young women. In the intervening decades he's pioneered hundreds of routes, and given many sexually themed names vulgar or explicit enough to make a seventh-grade boy titter. When current partner Martin describes him as "socially retarded," Robins nods in agreement. She says he keeps a book by his bedside of appropriate social gestures, so not to forget things like holidays and pleasantries. "When I'm on the rock I know how to act," Robins offers. "I just have to learn to do better on the ground."

	Blake Hales, a Seattle Pacific University student, enjoys the sunset and the view from atop The Feathers. Many of the climbs along The Feathers are difficult enough that most climbers use a rope, but the top also can be reached by other means.

To date, some say he's not quite figured it out. Take, for instance, the business of ridding routes of loose rock so climbers who follow won't get hurt. In the days before the crowds, Robins rarely worried about such things. But when a climber recently urged Robins to clean up some crack lines, he went at it with a vengeance.

"Here it was, a Saturday, a busy weekend, and he was on the wall with a sledgehammer and a crowbar throwing down rocks," says Eric Wickwire, an Ellensburg student and climber. Robins' response: He has a job, and can't do it during the week.

Once, Robins decided that one of the area's most prolific bolt climbers, Whitman professor Kevin Pogue, had drilled some bolts too close to a crack. Robins removed the bolts and sent a caustic e-mail of explanation to Pogue in Walla Walla. Virulent e-mail exchanges ensued, and hostilities lasted for months.

Then last year Robins visited a woman who owns land alongside the coulee, and told her climbers had put bolts in rocks on her property. Climbers had been debating how to approach her, hoping to persuade her to let them stay put. Instead Robins told her it was a liability risk, and volunteered to remove them — scotching chances, climbers fear, for later reaching a compromise.

"The guy's just trying to split up climbing," says guidebook author Yoder. "He doesn't realize there are more people out there, that we have to change. We have to be more considerate."

Robins says he acts because other climbers don't, and is mindful only of the coulee's future. He's seen other areas made off-limits because climbers didn't respect a landowner's property line. "The freedom of the old days is gone," he says. "We've been discovered, and we're getting more and more on people's radar screens."

"The desert is gone," he says, and ticks off uses no longer available. "Ask the dirt biker. We can do something, or we can sit around at the bar and swap stories with the dirt bikers about how great it used to be."

On this point, one of Robins' intermittent partners agrees. "Nowadays it's all about socializing," climber Paul Certa says. "It's about 'Let's catch some rays, climb a few routes, hang out with the dogs and maybe camp.' Bill and I aren't in it for the social life."

Martin insists Robins is enough of a loner he doesn't care much about what people think, but once he's out of earshot she whispers something else. When Robins first learned climbers suspected him in the latest bolt theft, "he stayed away for months. He was very uncomfortable." He even insisted he'd talk for this story "only if you make it clear I didn't seek you out." He didn't, but many climbers assumed otherwise.

Asked directly if he's the mystery thief, Robins adamantly says no. His friends and partners think the accusation ridiculous. They suspect someone stole the bolts simply to get expensive gear for free.

Auburn High School graduates, now three years into college, meet for a Memorial Day reunion in the camping area at Frenchman Coulee. A big concert nearby at The Gorge drew 500 or more campers and climbers for the three-day weekend — one of the biggest crowds here ever.

Besides, he's been known to support even his opponents on occasion. When someone angrily hammered flat the bolts on another route set by Pogue, who's clashed with him more than anyone, Robins put in new ones to make them safer. "Bill Robins actually replaced those hangars for me, as an atonement, I think," Pogue says.

Besides, Pogue continues, he's never heard Robins deny anything controversial he's done — he's too opinionated and brash for that. Bottom line: "I don't think he'd lie to me. I think someone else did it."

IT'S A SUNNY SPRING Saturday, and a dozen mostly middle-aged climbers lounge on their backpacks in the Coulee parking lot. They've been wrangling over a self-imposed "route moratorium." That means no one would establish any more new lines on the rock. It's a controversial move to slow their sport's spread, but few feel it would adequately tackle the real issues — no sanitation, poor monitoring of off-trail use. In the end they decide against it.

Climbers are still angry about this winter's theft, even though Pogue has since replaced most of the missing bolt lines, paid for by donations from other climbers. A few debated which gear they'd use to smash the mystery perp's face. One e-mail posting to the anonymous thief said: "It's hard to believe you could steal the enjoyment of these climbs from your fellow climbers, just to sustain your whacked out EGO!"

To others the bolts themselves were never the issue. They want to present a united front to state land managers as evidence that they can — if need be — police their own. "When there's internal griping, outsiders dismiss us all," says Fitz of the Access Fund.

It's too soon to say what will happen. A promised new guidebook will likely attract more climbers, but this group has opened a regular dialogue with state land managers. After a year of bitter meetings, many here think they're finally getting along.

But when a sport once dominated by rogues becomes the rage, what becomes of its most rogue-like disciples?

As the climbers debate, Robins is a half-mile away, roping up below a cliff and preparing to climb. Every few moments, as he dances up the rock, he emits odd little bursts of bawdy song. "I like swimming with bow-legged women," he yelps, his fingers stretching toward the next hold.

Craig Welch is a Seattle Times staff reporter. Steve Ringman is a Times staff photographer.