“The biggest question we get is phrased along the lines of, ‘You use a computer to output route designs, right?’”

John Oungst, the Regional Head Routesetter for Momentum Indoor Climbing’s Texas gyms, grins. He’s sitting in the Katy gym, surrounded by colorful walls jutting in different shapes and angles, covered in bright holds. At four in the afternoon, people are only just starting to trickle in; but within a few hours, the place will be packed. Members will lace up chalky shoes and pull on harnesses. Newcomers will hover nervously around the rental desk. Soon, the walls will be covered in climbers.

Each will be climbing a single route or boulder problem, from which there are hundreds to choose. At least a few times a week, new ones appear in wide swaths; a rotation of fresh, colored routes, sparkling in comparison to their chalk-coated neighbors and begging you to tie in.

And if you’re like me, you never think twice about it. You show up at the gym. There’s stuff to climb. You climb it. The process of how that stuff got there didn’t cross my mind until, a few months in, I noticed a name written under the grade tag on a route. It was both obvious and a revelation — someone was actually making these. And as a new climber, I wondered how.

“So setting is essentially design, right?” Kenny Benson, the Head Routesetter for Momentum’s Silver Street location, motions offhandedly to the wall behind me. The process starts, like most works of art, with a blank slate: It’s been stripped bare, and a team of eight guys in various combinations of tank tops and cargo shorts shuffle around, eyeing it.

The parallels unfold as I watch their process. The gym is on a specific setting schedule, ensuring that each section of wall gets a makeover on a regular rotation. When the setters arrive, they determine what section needs setting, and down come the existing routes.

“Once we take everything off the wall, we roll back here,” says Miles West, a former setter for Momentum, leading me through a door in the back of the Katy gym that I’ve never noticed before and into a large room lined on every side with shelves. Everywhere I look, there are baskets of holds. They’re divided by color and grip type, some too big for a container and piled right on top of each other. Two setters are unwrapping new volumes on an enormous table. Power drills and various hardware are arranged around a workbench, also home to a greasy plate. Looks like old pizza.

In the same way I create an outline before I put pen to paper, the setters split into groups to discuss what kind of routes or problems need to be set — the grades, the styles, etc. From there, they pick the routes they’d each like to set and gather the necessary tools.

And certain tools are necessary.

“It’s a combination of analytical and artistic thought process,” Kenny notes.

If route setting is creative work, it’s more functional than fine, more craft than art. Architecture, almost. The end result may be aesthetically pleasing — sure. But more importantly, it has a purpose to serve.

For competition setting, a boulder problem or sport route needs to be challenging to a particular degree, and varied enough in movement to ensure that different climbers fall at different points. In a commercial setting, like Momentum’s gyms, setters are trying to coax climbers of different levels into certain movements and encourage growth. The angle of the wall and grade of the climb determine the generosity of holds. Are they sharp? Are they juggy? Where on the route will they be placed? Is it safe to fall there, or too sketchy — necessitating an easier path? This, the setters tell me, is the science.

Luckily, they have plenty of elements to choose from.

“Routesetting, as a profession, has lagged behind the rest of the indoor climbing industry when it comes to resources and compensation — because if you think about it, at the end of the day, all we’re doing is putting plastic on a wooden wall. Right?” John tells me, animated. “So it’s still hard for a lot of owners and companies to grasp why they would pay a person a salary with benefits to do that. A lot of gyms don’t want to invest heavily into their setting programs. Momentum doesn’t view it that way, though. In fact, they’re the exact opposite. They recognize the importance of routesetting and investing in the people that are doing it.

“Because we have a CEO and company who supports us and what we do, we have a lot of resources available to us that other gyms don’t have. That might not be something customers necessarily recognize, but we have it good. Even if you removed all of us and brought in a whole new crew, the bar would still be high because of everything we have available to us."

The others on the team agree wholeheartedly.

“Setting is so much fun in this gym, because there’s so many amazing holds,” says Tyler Smith, one of two setters participating in an internship program John put together to encourage and train the next generation of routesetters. “Some of the holds we use for feet at the start of a route here…"

He trails off, eyes scanning the room, then points out a route on the lead wall.

“You see that starting foothold?” he asks. I nod, eyeing the large, yellow orb. “That would be like blasphemy at another gym, because it’s such a cool hold. But here, that’s like a dime a dozen. It’s part of what got me into setting here, because there’s so many cool holds."

The sheer amount of tools to work with make the analysis portion of setting simpler.

“Sort of like a chef would have ingredients, you have the wall and you have your holds,” Kenny continues. “But the actual cooking is in the movement — how you bring those things together to make a whole problem."

The cooking, as Kenny puts it, is what pushes setting into the creative; the art realm. And like any art, the final product is dependent on the artist, and what influences them. Each setter's personal history, experience, and preferences — not only in climbing, but in general life — come into play when they work on a wall.

“As a video editor and motion graphic designer, I think setting is very similar,” says Travis Newman, the second team member participating in the routesetting internship program. “I was a tease editor, and most boulders are a lot like a tease — you get your skeleton on the wall, then go through and tweak it, which is like your rough cut in video terms.

"I like to put thematic things in my teases — and with boulders, there are certain kinds of movement or certain holds you don’t want just one of. I usually go in sets of three. Three’s always a good number. And I tend to create in sets of three, anyway, no matter what medium. For me, it’s so much the same in both [video and setting]."

Kenny (and his cooking parallel) noted that not only personal and professional history; but geography, too, plays a role in what you set.

“I tend to stay in kind of the southern comfort world,” he shrugs — and several other setters chime in with their agreement. He, Miles, Travis, and Blake Compton all have climbing roots deep in the southeast, and prefer climbing that mimics the rock you’d find there and the powerful, dynamic moves it requires.

“We all gravitate towards really big holds, not so much the tiny little baby stuff,” Miles says — then immediately backtracks. “Well, Travis weighs twelve pounds, so actually, he does like the tiny stuff…" The setters within earshot dissolve into laughter. Travis doesn’t deny it. I ask him later to describe his personal setting style. Before the question has even fully left my mouth, with zero hesitation and a smirk, he answers, “Bulls**t nasty crimps."

His coworkers may give him a hard time for it, but all of them admit to setting what they, too, personally like to climb.

For example, “I’m not a particularly strong person, but I’m really good at coordinating my moves,” Miles explains. “As a drummer, I know how to tell my feet and hands what to do. Left foot here, okay, get it set; now, forget that and now right foot do this; left hand, focus on that, etc."

And Tyler, shorter than the others on the team, says he tends to set with climbers of similar size in mind.

“I try to make it so that you might get shut down on a climb because of skill, but not because of size,” he says. Though he’s quick to add, “I would say with experienced setting, you get better and better at fitting and accommodating different body types on a route."

Amin Abbasi, the Head Routesetter for Momentum’s Katy location and the team member his fellow setters regale as their most widely-experienced, brings perhaps the greatest variety of major influences to his setting. The Iranian climber, coach, and setter moved to the United States in 2017, and brought with him not only international setting style and experience, but an educational sensibility.

 “Climbing is weird in that coaching isn’t as common as it is in other sports,” he tells me. “But setting and coaching can be kind of the same. I try to set more technical than powerful stuff. Sometimes it’s hard for the climber, because they just want to, you know” — he pauses and flexes his muscles jokingly, grinning — “use only their strength. But I try for things more based on body position and technique. I try to teach the climber, you know?"

Even on a day-to-day basis, there are small, more intricate influences that come into play.

“Some of the setters listen to music, and the music defines the movement they create,” John tells me. "I would do that early in my setting career if I was struggling to create a new climb — if I was listening to classical music, I would set this really beautiful, flowy route where you move around a lot and get to use your feet all over the place. Other times I would listen to Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin — more upbeat music — and it would be this more jumpy, really powerful route."

Miles, as the resident musician, took it a step further.

“I’ve found that certain types of music don’t mix well with certain types of terrain,” he says. “Like slab climbing is typically very slow, methodical, really balance-based; and you kind of have to be thinking clearly and moving slowly. But my preferred style of music is relatively heavy, right? So I can’t listen to my preferred style of music when I’m setting slab because it just turns out mixed up and really weird. Conversely, if I happen to listen to super slow, ambient kind of stuff when I’m setting roof climbing? It doesn’t work out."

(I’m so fascinated by this that I pause to ask if he’s found a band in his preferred style that does work well for setting. The answer? “Circa Survive,” he beams. “Some heaviness, but there’s a little bit of melody as well.”)

“Even your mood can affect what you do on the wall,” John shrugs in conclusion. "I have days where I come in and — maybe I’m not even grumpy or frustrated, in a bad mood. Maybe I’m just tired, and it’s been a long week, and it’s Friday, and I come in and set something. You might not recognize that specifically when you’re climbing the route, but you may recognize that it feels a little different than something I would normally set."

The setters take the wall, the holds, and their individual hosts of influences — from where they were born to Circa Survive — and combine those elements to create their routes and problems.

From there, the design process broadens to its natural next stage.

"Once it’s on the wall, that’s where it becomes like a collaborative thing,” Miles explains, “and I think that’s where it parallels music more than anything."

"You’re a group at that point. There are multiple things having to work together — it’s not just your own thing on the wall. That’s just where the testing process begins. We’re having to sort it out together. ‘Oh, I like this; I don’t like this.’ We’re cutting and pasting, you know what I mean?”

It’s that process of collaboration, in fact, that drew Miles to setting to begin with.

“I was focused on music all throughout my life, and then one day I was at the gym and overheard the conversations the setters were having,” he remembers. “It really paralleled writing and recording a song — that kind of compromise based on different people’s perspectives. What it could or should be. That started it all for me."

The team looks at the problems and routes they’ve each set individually and offers their own ideas and tweaks to improve them. They try each move out — forerunning — and edit as they go. They point out blind spots their coworkers may have missed, offer suggestions, and add hints of their own flavor to other styles.

“We’re helping each other by coming in with fresh eyes,” Kenny says.

Travis notes that while building his initial set is like creating a rough cut for a video, “the forerunning process is like having a producer watch it and making changes from there. The key is separating yourself from it a little bit and not getting too tied to it — realizing even if you had an idea, you can’t get locked on it. Collaborating gets you out of your box."

He grins, then adds, “And also, remembering that getting feedback doesn’t mean, ‘Your route is trash.’ It just means, hey, you had this idea, but you need to move some things around to make it go the way you want."

“We all have our strengths, and as a crew, that’s what gives us diversity in the gym,” John tells me.

And it doesn’t hurt that, as Tyler sums it up, “we have insanely talented people in our crew."

“Our setting team is rare, I think,” Kenny agrees. “We all have different backgrounds and experience levels. What I like is not necessarily what everyone else likes, and that’s a good thing! Not only for us, but also for members."

Analysis, creativity, collaboration. The design process routesetting follows is blissfully straightforward, a perfect parallel to other forms of art.

Until, of course, it isn’t.

Because while that process results in a lasting design in almost all other creative fields, the catch that places setting apart is the short-term life of the final product.

“It’s an art process, but sometimes I talk to my friends who are artists [of other kinds] and ask them, ‘How many projects or paintings do you have to do in a week? Or a month?’” Amin tells me. “Some of them say four or five, maybe ten. But we do this stuff every day, sometimes five to six times every day. And every movement is in a different style, every route is meant to be really creative."

It’s a little heartbreaking on one hand, if you think about it. Pouring creative energy into things that will only last a few weeks at most. Kenny says he knows setters who catalog every step of the process —external hard drives full of photos at each step of their designs. Blank wall, pre-forerun, post-forerun, and a video of them running the final route. None of the setters I talk to at Momentum bother, though.

“I’ve set so many routes at this point,” John laughs. “I’ve probably set at least…”

He pauses, thinks seriously.

“I’ve set at least 5,000 routes. Probably more."

On the other hand, though, it’s art for art’s sake — playful in form and motivation, and wonderfully interactive. And that seems to be the reason behind the work, according to the team.

“It’s an awesome job — pretty hard to beat — but it can be a grind. When the day in and day out gets a little monotonous, we try to remind ourselves when we do cool moves and set cool routes. Like, ‘Ryley,’” John yells suddenly, pretending to grab me by the shoulders, gesturing excitedly towards an imaginary set of holds I drilled into an imaginary wall, “‘That was the coolest freakin’ thing you’ve ever set!’ You know?” He sits back. "Occasionally, we all just have to take a moment to stop and appreciate it."

“It’s cool to see my own evolution over my career,” Kenny adds. “We set every day, we put holds on the wall every day, and it can get kind of boring if you don’t find a way to look back or, in some weird way, look forward, and leave something cool on the table for yourself. Not for members, not for the other setters, just purely for yourself."

That’s not to say setters don’t appreciate others’ input, of course. Every single one expressed the enjoyment watching climbers on their routes can bring.

“It’s cool when people come up and are like, ‘Hey, I really liked that route,’” Kenny admits. “You’re like, ‘Oh, sick, someone noticed that someone put that on the wall, and that I put it on the wall.' I don’t think it’s necessary, but it would be nice if people understood that, you know, someone put a lot of thought and effort into what they’re climbing. It isn’t like we just threw it up real quick."

In other words, at the end of the day, setters design for the love of it; but climbers, give them some love.

“The age we live in, everybody expects things are done digitally,” John shrugs. “But setting is something that’s not a digital process. Some setters may take a notebook and jot down their ideas and map it out when they find the right wall; or they’ll try to recreate something they’ve seen before or imagined. But otherwise?"

He taps his head, eyes still on the wall.

“Setting is all up here. It’s a creative, individual process, from the mind, what we do.”