ENDGAME

Not to brag or anything, but I’ve put up approximately 100 new routes in China, all of them solo, all of them executed with impeccable style. Freestanding limestone spires: been there. Whole-horizon enchainments: done that. Because I’m a humble, selfeffacing Yankee, I haven’t formally documented these ascents, preferring to keep such intimate, arduous quests between me and the rugged mountains. I climb solely for the love of landscape, the love of envisioning elegant lines through complex terrain.

Pause. Let me make it perfectly clear that I’ve never set foot anywhere near the People’s Republic. And that I’m mildly acrophobic, a peeweeleague mountaineer at best. And that each of my bold, forwardthinking ascents was launched from a living room basecamp in Vermont: overstuffed armchair, mug of hot cocoa, reading lamp, glossy coffeetable book filled with ancient Chinese landscape paintings. As others are passionate about throwing themselves into the hardship and glory of real mountains, I am passionate about doing the same for representations of mountains.

Book in lap, I shrink down.

I scan for weaknesses, for offwidth cracks and linkable ledges.

I lean forward, reach high—and send.

This hobby of imaginatively projecting my body into the inky vertical of landscape paintings may seem idiosyncratic, but it’s not. Gary Snyder, a Pulitzer-winning author who kicked steps and glissaded on snowy volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest as a teenager, describes a similar brand of mental adventuring: “The mountains and rivers of the Sung dynasty paintings are numinous and remote. Yet they could be walked.

. . . Studying Fan K’uan’s “Travellers Among Streams and Mountains” (about 1000 AD)—a hanging scroll seven feet tall—one can discern a possible climbing route up the chimneys to the left of the waterfall. The travelers and their packstock are safe below on the trail. They could be coming into the Yosemite Valley in the 1870s.”

If you’re thinking of Bradford