Over the course of several years, with myriad different partners, I established a new route on Johnson Mountain (6,120’), just south of the Watchman formation in Zion National Park. True Believers (800’, III+ 5.11 C2) follows an obvious corner system on the mountain’s north face and climbs 500’ of technical terrain, with another 300’ of scrambling to the summit.

After initially scoping the line from the valley in 2014, Ethan Newman, Rob Warden, and I headed up for a closer look. We climbed to pitch three all free, via fun and varied crack climbing, but the lack of proper kit (ball nuts) to surmount a roof on pitch three forced us to retreat. A number of other attempts followed, with similar equipment mishaps. Ethan, Joel Enrico, and I took the route to the large ledge at the end of the technical climbing in the fall of 2014. Above the roof on pitch three, the rock got significantly softer and became much more survival climbing than fun rock climbing. Alan Thorne, Al Lapinski, and I finally took the route to Johnson’s summit in June 2016. The name refers to an article about Zion climbing written by Bryan Bird in Rock and Ice and titled "True Believers."

– Steffan Gregory