2009 GOLDEN PITON AWARDS

Breakaway Success

JONATHAN SIEGRIST

If you live in Colorado’s Front Range, chances are you’ve bumped into a friendly, low-key father-and-son team: Bob and Jon. Both lean, wiry, small-framed climbers, the pair get around: they always seem to be out in the hills trying something difficult. Bob, in this case, is Bob Siegrist, an understated hardman who redpoints 5.12-plus. And John is Jonathan “J-Star” Siegrist, 24, climbing only six years but having become a Front Range fixture for ascents like Vogue (5.14b), Grand Ole Opry (5.14b/c), Sarchasm (5.14a), and a placing-pro-on-lead tick of Tommy Caldwell’s Lumpy Ridge thin-crack nightmare Country Boy (5.13d). But while J-Star’s talent had become renowned locally, it was his October-November 2009 trip to Kentucky’s Red River Gorge that thrust him into the national spotlight. There, in the course of only 11 climbing days, Siegrist climbed nearly every major testpiece at the Red.

Siegrist’s Red ticklist is too long to cite here, but some highlights include a five-try ascent of Lucifer (5.14c), rapid-fire ticks of the 5.14c’s Southern Smoke and Fifty Words for Pump, three 5.14a flashes, three 5.13c onsights, onsights of 10 routes graded either 5.13a or 5.13b, and a flurry of other 5.13 flashes and rapid-fire 5.13+ or 5.14- redpoints. Sure, other climbers have nailed some of these milestones individually or in much smaller batches, but never, like Siegrist, in one fell swoop. So while it’s clear that Siegrist has had latent talent all along, he wins the 2009 Breakaway Success Golden Piton for focusing his hard work and gifts into a single, American-standard-redefining road trip. 

Honorable Mentions:

• Zhenja Kazbekova, for redpointing 5.13d/14a (Zhuzha, Don’t Be Chicken!) at age 12. The Ukrainian, herself the daughter of two top Ukrainian climbers, also ticked a 5.13c/d in 2009, both routes at the Kransy Kramen cliff in the Crimea.
• Phil Schaal, an under-the-radar bouldering talent from Connecticut, for the fifth ascent of the Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, V15 Jade, and a tick of the V14 Ode to the Modern Man, at Mount Evans.