At only 25,  the young engineer John Horn discovered an essential design flaw in construction of the famed Diablo Canyon Power Plant near Santa Barbara, California. In his next career, at LucasFilm, he worked on films such as Forrest Gump and Star Wars, and contributed to systems for two films that won Academy Awards for technical achievement. He was also a dedicated and joyous sport climber, whose death of a stroke last year at 55 was a complete surprise.

Now two annual $2,500 sport-climbing grants will honor him in perpetuity.

The John L. Horn, Jr. Memorial Sport Climbing Award is the brainchild of Horn’s widow, Laurie Berliner, who says, “The weekend before his stroke we were mountain biking in the Humboldt Redwoods, and the night before, John and I were training in the Berkeley Ironworks Touchstone climbing gym.” The two were a vital part of the Marin County climbing community.  “He was a wonderful man," she says, "and still pulling down hard until the very end.”

LucasFilm and various professional and climber friends supported

the grant she created.

The award is currently limited to young climbers in the Sierra Nevada, but Berliner hopes further support may allow it to expand in scope.

Administrated by the American Alpine Club, the John L. Horn, Jr. Memorial Sport Climbing Award intends to give two annual grants of $2,500 each to a male and female between 18 and 25, with “preference to those who propose well-planned trips targeting sport climbing destinations outside of the United States. Qualified applicants will need to demonstrate a high-level of proficiency in sport climbing ability and safety practices, yet not be a professional or sponsored climbing athlete.” They must be members of the American Alpine Club, or join, to qualify. Already agreeing to serve on the selection committee is Ethan Pringle, well-traveled and accomplished sport climber, a friend of the couple.

While various awards have been set up to encourage exploration and challenging alpinism, this one appears to be the first privately funded sport-climbing award (a corporate award offered by a Bay Area climbing gym, Planet Granite, supports projects combining sport climbing and community service). Considering how many people love sport climbing, and that it is a relatively safe and accessible adventure for the young, this grant is a great addition to the impressive array of existing grants for climbers and climber-researchers or artists.

Horn logged visits to Thailand (four trips from 1999 to 2009), Greece (two trips to Kalymnos, one of which included an onsight of Spartacus, 7b+ / 5.12c), France (Buoux, Ceuse, and the Gorges du Tarn) and Spain, as well as across this country. At the Jailhouse, Sonora, he climbed various athletic routes including Fugitive (5.13a), while a note about onsighting Iniquity, a 5.12b at the steep Red River Gorge, Kentucky (his favorite area), contains the amusing celebratory phrase “plus victory whip.”

Linda McMillan, past AAC vice president, lauds Horn's “courageous response” during work on the construction of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the California coast.

As the Santa Barbara Independent wrote in an article, "A 1987 report by the Utilities Commission blamed PG&E for wracking up $4.4 billion in avoidable costs during construction of the Diablo Canyon plant. The most famous snafu was discovered in 1981 by a 25-year-old engineer, John L. Horn, who, on the job less than a year, pointed out that for the previous four years, construction crews had been reading an essential engineering diagram for one of the reactor containment domes upside down. That, too, sent PG&E's construction crews back to the drawing board."

Says McMillan, “Evidently, John faced tremendous pressure NOT to raise this issue up the PG&E chain of command, and was mindful of what had become of Karen Silkwood in the mid-70s. According to friends of John, things got very dicey for him until government officials came to his defense, and the problem was finally remedied, much to the relief of the people of California.”

The Stanford-educated Horn’s engineering and photography skills led him to a second career as a high-powered software engineer. According to http://johnlhornaward.org: “In 1988, he began his 22 year career at LucasFilm on the EditDroid project, helping transition film editing from analog to the digital age. Thereafter in the R&D division, ‘the code mine,’ as John called it, he co-developed image processing, animation, and motion capture technologies.  John made important contributions to software engineering including 2 systems that won Academy Awards for technical achievement.  John worked on dozens of feature films, co-designed video game tools and computer technologies used on a TV series, and most recently he worked on a project with a patent pending.”

McMillan notes that she was able to help Laurie Berliner set up the John Horn Award with the AAC because years ago Dick Duane drew her into his effort to create the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure after the tragic loss of Galen and Barbara Rowell in a plane crash. “The award quickly attracted a large and very passionate committee to chose the recipients, and last year we moved the award to the AAC." She calls John Horn and Galen Rowell quite similar: "intense, focused, fun-loving,  methodical, and absolutely committed to living a large life on their own terms. They burned so very brightly that they sparked many others to pursue their own adventures.”

For information, see John Horn Award:
http://johnlhornaward.org/

(Photo: John Horn, in photo taken only last March. Courtesy Laurie Berliner.)