“I’ve been working a lot more than I’ve been climbing,” he said. “You?”
“Same,” I said. “I hangboarded yesterday. Does that count?”
“We can climb the Nose off the couch,” Owen said delusionally.
“Maybe you can,” I replied.
I did some math in my head. The Nose is around thirty pitches, at roughly a hundred feet a pitch. The so-called “apron,” the less-than-vertical swoop at the bottom of the wall, constitutes the first four or five hundred feet. The bulk of the route is crack-climbing, let’s say two thousand feet’s worth, in a variety of sizes. Along with that, there’s a few hundred feet of vertical face climbing, some in the Gray Bands near the midway point, and some in the overhanging bolted pitches at the top. For months I’d been studying the topo map of the route, memorizing its every detail, comparing the hand-drawn illustrations with photographs, trying to overlay the climbing specs with the physical actuality of the wall.
Now I turned my attention to the Gun Boulder. A mosquito sank its proboscis into my puffed-up forearm, and I flexed hard to see if I could make the bug explode. I’d heard this was hypothetically possible, but it didn’t work this time. “How tall is that slab?” I asked Owen, pointing at our warm-up.
“Eighteen feet? Twenty?”
“Let’s say twenty,” I said. “So if the Nose has five hundred feet of slab, how many laps is that?”
“Twenty-five.” Owen’s good. I’d have needed a calculator.
“Okay, and there’s two thousand feet of crack, and the crack there,” I pointed toward the tallest part of the splitter, “is what, twenty-five feet?”
He knew where I was headed. “Eighty laps.”
That didn’t seem so bad. Kind of.
“And the vert side here is what, another twenty feet? So, twenty-five laps on that?”
“Sure,” Owen said. “And the descent.”
“I think it’s a ten-mile hike,” I said. “So that’s like doing this walk-off five thousand
times?”
“Give or take.”
A great many shapes in nature—clouds, ferns, tree branches, river systems, wildfires—exhibit self-similarity across scale. Rocks exhibit this fractal geometry too. Underpinning the physical structure of granite is a basic kernel shape that iterates upward in size until it creates a boulder, a hillock, a cliffband, a mountain, a massif. It is the proverbial universe in a grain of sand. So climbing El Cap is like climbing anything. It’s like scaling a pea-sized gravel pebble. I squinted at the bright Gun Boulder, feeling my face roast in the high-elevation sunlight. A silence fell, during which I got nervous, and during which I suspect Owen, a lifelong endurance athlete who loves suffering, got a little stoked. Every mountain contains infinite miniature mountains. I climbed the hand crack, walked off the boulder, and climbed it again.
*
Back at the cabin after the Gun Boulder sesh—what about the boulder was so gunlike? I wondered—we sipped hard seltzer instead of beer, due to Owen’s gluten intolerance, and perused the How to Big Wall Climb guidebook that we hoped would see us through our audacious endeavor. The two-page spread presenting pitch-by-pitch topos for the Nose also had a sidebar quote from Warren Harding, who upon completing the first ascent had written, “As I hammered in the last bolt and staggered over the rim, it was not at all clear to me who was conqueror and who was conquered: I do recall that El Cap seemed to be in much better condition than I was.”
Owen returned to the lowlands and the weeks passed. One night, above the table at the cabin, a glittering cloud of dust motes caught the light, drifting down toward the heap of rice and beans on my plate. I’d just returned from a cliff-band nearby, where I spent the evening practicing another big-wall climbing technique called jugging, a way to ascend a fixed line using sliding tools that grip the rope when they’re weighted. The first time I tried jugging was a disaster, everything jerky and off-kilter, but tonight after fixing the line I snapped on the ascenders in seconds, clipped my stirrups and slings at lengths that left me all the right dimensions and reaches, and got halfway up the hundred-foot pitch in minutes. I remembered to tie off my backup loops, I felt the rhythmic push-pull of the rope’s bounce and my own tugs working in harmony, and I sensed no appreciable fatigue anywhere in my body, despite a heavy volume of climbing over the last few days. At the top I switched over to my rappel device, descended, and then at the base among the ferns I clipped my ascenders back to the line. The rap device was hot to the touch, so hot I couldn’t handle it without burning my fingertips, sparking and fizzing like a live wire. I repeated the process four more times, up and down, up and down, for a total of five hundred feet of ascending. Then I returned to the cabin for dinner.
When I looked at one of the dust motes more closely, it turned out to be a tiny baby spider, lowering from the light fixture on a barely visible thread. All the other dust motes in the air were spiders too, hundreds of them. Not having the heart to unmoor the first spider from its anchor, to cut its rope and let it fall, I watched in stillness as it landed on my plate. It scampered off onto the table, a remarkable flurry of purpose despite only just having been born. Then I felt a tickle on my scalp and dislodged something, not a spider, but a hard object that made a ticking sound as it dropped to the table: a grain of gravel. More slowly, then, I ran my fingertips through my hair and found many more bits of rock and sand, which must have nestled into my scalp while I scuffed up and down the cliff earlier in the evening. As I shook them out I thought to myself, I am becoming a landscape. And of course, in the most literal of terms, I am a landscape, a habitat for the innumerable microbes and bacteria and cooperative entities that constitute the planet I self-importantly think of as Brian. To the creatures in my gut, to the amoebas floating across my eyes, to the mites that traverse the surface of my body foraging in the forests of my skin, I am a world in all its fullness, all its providence and hardship. Down into my orbit the spiders continued to fall.
You can zoom in on anything, it will fill your senses and your days to the brim. Another aspect of fractal geometry is the coastline paradox, an observation that the more precisely you measure a stretch of coastline, the longer its length becomes. As you tally up the perimeter of each rock and pebble, each grain of sand, each bend and swerve of their constituent microscopic architectures, the sum total of your shoreline approaches infinity. Even the little lagoon below the cabin contains untold, unending multitudes. I’ve started to know every stone my feet touch on the path around the lake. I’ve started to notice where they’re worn, like the stairs of ancient cathedrals, by the passage of countless footfalls, more and more of which are mine. Think of the slimness of the material that a passing foot shears from a bombproof hunk of stone: this is the thinnest of slicings, and yet over the ages the protrusions wear smooth, the sharp crystals round, the knife-edges soften into spoons. This summer I felt the stone do the same to me, as our shared routines wore the sharp edges off of my body. Unfamiliar movements, through repetition, became intuitive; tenuous positions, through repetition, became tenable. I felt easy with myself, streamlined. Polished by the passage of days to a hard bright glow.
The annals of mountaineering literature contain thousands of war metaphors, but alternatives pop up, too, from time to time. One of my favorites appears in The White Spider, where the author describes his partner’s lead up a difficult pitch on the Eiger’s infamous North Face as “a toe-dance on the ice—a toe-dance above a perpendicular drop. He got a hold on the rock, a hold on the ice, bent himself double, uncoiled himself, the front points of his crampons moving ever upwards.” The sport looks quite different, and in my humble opinion quite a lot more appealing, when its practitioners are viewed as dancers rather than soldiers. While the perennial battle metaphors emphasize climbing’s supposed brutality and danger, a dance metaphor teases out, instead, the delicate partnership between the climber and the wall, the rhythmic nature of the movements that connect them, and the aesthetic pleasure that can arise from a perfectly executed performance. When your technique is on point, the cliff is a dancefloor instead of a battlefield. Rather than conflict and combat, there’s communication and communion.
So I dutifully drilled the dance steps I’d need to know on the Nose, jugging the cliffs behind the cabin, running thousands of feet of top-rope solo laps on cracks at Old Camp Bluff, tediously aiding thin seams in Woodfords Canyon.
And then the season turned, autumn deepened, and the lights came up for the big show.
Excerpt from Erratica: On Climbing, Language, and Touching Stone, copyright 2026 by Brian Laidlaw, used with permission of Milkweed Editions.
