Raymond Connelly, a San Fransisco would-be writer is still living uneasily with his failure to climb Yosemite's El Capitan with his childhood friend and alter ego, Mo Lehrman. As he circumnavigates his way through life on the edges of the West Coast's counter-culture, trying to live his life like one of Mo's stories which are more real than life itself, Ray lifts the best of those tales for his own book. But when he is accused of plagiarism, Ray suffers an attack of conscience and set's off in search of Mo - to explain, and to make good by finishing their shared climb.
