What do you do with a guy who warms up on The Mandala (V12) before establishing yet another Buttermilk headpoint super-highball? Well, besides giving him — the 23-year-old kinesiology student Kevin Jorgeson, of Santa Rosa, California — the 2007 Bouldering Golden Piton for his Bishop vision quest, you find enough rock to keep him busy.
A studied technician, Jorgeson, on his FAs, often combines savvy pad placement with roped cleaning and rehearsal. In Bishop, he’s done: The Beautiful and Damned — V13, with a 5.13 (V7/8) slab 30 feet off the hardpack; and Flight of the Bumblebee, a 40-foot V9 with a high crux. Jorgeson’s CV also includes all of Bishop’s major superhighballs (Evilution, This Side of Paradise, etc.) and plenty of V12 to V14 ammo. And last summer, near Allenspark, Colorado, Jorgeson FA’ed Fish out of Water, a 25-foot V12 slapfest (check out RockyMountainHighball.com for more).
Jorgeson’s passion for climbing goes way back: as a toddler, he snuck up a 25-foot ladder (to his father’s horrified surprise), and at age 10 self-taught prussiking in a backyard tree. The photographer Andrew Mann says Jorgeson combines the physical gift of a Chris Sharma with the mental game of a Peter Croft: “Kevin may be the only guy out there who’s tested himself at the physical limit so often way above the ground,” says Mann. “What others try to guess, Kevin already knows.”
-- Climbing Magazine, February 2008
Marmot Athlete Kevin Jorgeson is based out of Santa Rosa, CA. Learn more about him on marmotpro.com.
