RunOut #26: More is More with Bill Ramsey

Rumor has it, Randy Leavitt first spotted Clark Mountain from an airplane. To be more specific, he saw an impressively long shadow being cast by a cliff, and surmised that there be overhanging rock yonder way.

Worth exploring? Hell yeah.

Sure enough, the ever-prolific Leavitt would go on to develop the climbing on Clark Mountain, which is situated at the California-Nevada border, high over the desolate Mojave Preserve. It’s a haul just to get the parking lot. A grueling 90-minute hike ensues to reach the goods up on the so-called Third Tier. But the reward is arguably the most impressive piece of limestone in North America, a bone-white shield, tilted 50 degrees overhanging and soaring impossibly twoard the sky.

The most famous route here is Chris Sharma’s Jumbo Love, America’s first 5.15b and one of North America’s hardest climbs. To its left is its little sibling, Jumbo Pumping Hate, a 5.14a that Leavitt had originally completed as a four-pitch route. Few could believe the photographs of Leavitt on this route.

“That’s in America? Holy shit!”

One of those climbers was Bill Ramsey, who saw those photos of Jumbo Pumping Hate, and put that climb on his bucket list.

Fast forward a couple decades to this past spring, when Bill, 11 days after turning 59 years old, clipped the chains on Jumbo Pumping Hate with his own successful ascent. Days later, he was in the OR to get hip surgery. Routine maintenance for 59-year-old bone crushers.

Ramsey is philosophy professor, longtime climber, and prolific route developer. He’s timeless in all the right ways. Conversation with him never gets old—and he never seems to get old. One of the most impressive stats about him is that he has climbed 25 of his 26 5.14s after he turned 40.

This is Andrew Bisharat, and I’m here with Chris Kalous and we thought Ramsey’s recent send would be a good excuse to check in with our favorite climbing philosopher, this Socrates of Send.

But first I wanted to share a passage Ramsey wrote for my website, Evening Sends. He wrote a piece for the Day I Sent series about doing Golden, a 5.14b in Utah. You should check it out because, of all the Day I Sent stories I’ve run on my site, this was the only one that needed not a single edit. It came in perfect. It describes a wonderful moment in climbing that’s available to all of us—a moment that Ramsey himself most certainly experienced that day recently up on Clark Mountain.

It goes.

“All extended athletic careers are punctuated by moments that Kant, and later Gumbrecht, characterized as instances of the “sublime.” They are the rarest of times when luck, skill, and some degree of gumption combine to create what is best described as a fleeting but undeniable moment of grace. Some professional athletes can conjure several of these in their career, and that’s why they are superstars. But even for us rank amateurs, there are the rare instances when it all clicks and body and mind enter a state of communion that transcends our normal mediocrity.”