Jonathan Siegrist Cruises Up Adam Ondra's Classic Italian 9a+

There's not as much information I feel about really hard roots in Italy but if you dig a little bit you can find that there's a lot of really nice roots here and when I was doing a bit of research I really was just looking for some hard roots, some 9a plus or 9b roots. Really it's when I started to research the whole crag, Cornalba and like the location and the history here in this crag and the style and just the aesthetic of it, it's incredibly beautiful. That's when I had this feeling like I have to go and see this place, I have to go to Cornalba. Oh my god I thought there was no way it could be dry. For sure at least some of the holes in the top would be wet but they were all dry. I learned something from Tommy Caldwell once and it always will stick with me, it's like his policy is you just don't even look at the weather you just go climbing. He's like nine out of ten times you go when you wouldn't have gone and it's great and then the 10% when you go and it's heinous then you have a sweet story. I think one story that I found particularly interesting was that this Italian climber Bruno Tassi, he did a lot of development and you know some time ago I think in Italy it was quite normal to chip holds and to manufacture roots. I found that all the crags we went to had a little bit of something but he had the vision to bolt and equip this root gold rake. He saw that it would be possible to climb without using any chips holds and he left it for the future and and it's really cool then to hear that Adam then in 2010, which now is 11 years ago you know quite a long time ago, he came and kind of rediscovered this cool project and I'm so glad that it was saved if you will because the climbing on is incredible and I think that it's difficult to have that kind of vision you know to think that one day it will be possible but maybe it's not possible for me or for my friends now. So I really respect that from him and it really turned into a beautiful route. I've really missed climbing in Europe and now for 18 months I've been in the United States kind of trying to bolt some routes and find some obscure routes to climb but for many years before that I loved coming to Europe every year and trying hard routes and so I think that I put a lot of pressure on myself more than a lot of routes in the past couple of years. I really really wanted to do it and so you know when you have this desire and the expectation then it makes things a little bit harder but it also makes the reward and the feeling of accomplishment that much better. I don't really know many things as an adult that can give you this same kind of feeling of like relief as sending a route that you really really want. You've been trying for a long time or that really means something to you. I'm grateful for it all and I'm really happy for our time in Italy and for our time here in Cornoba.