This Las Vegas Professor Is the Oldest to Climb 5.14. The Feat Comes With Some Quirks.

After a long day of climbing in early February, my friends and I hiked down from Mount Potosi’s Clear Light Cave in Nevada. In the wash, we ran into Bill Ramsey, a friend and climbing legend, as he was heading up to the crag.

The University of Las Vegas philosophy professor hiked with a hand-fashioned portable toilet strapped to his back. He’d been working on Ghost Meat, a pit bull 5.14 that runs along the Clear Light Cave’s power band. Uncle Bill, as he’s known to many Nevada climbers, wanted to reduce the number of “white flowers” by stationing a toilet at the steep limestone sport crag.

“I don’t know of anyone who has climbed 5.14 at 65 and certainly no one who’s climbed multiple 5.14s at that age,” says Ramsey, who has been climbing for half a century.

A few weeks ago, Ramsey redpointed Ghost Meat, his second 5.14 this year. Just days before his 65th birthday, he also completed Wrongdoer (5.14a) close by at Mt. Charleston. A number of other climbers in their 60s have achieved this elusive grade of 5.14. American Chuck Odette topped T-Rex (5.14b) in Utah’s Maple Canyon at age 64; he continues to rope up today. And Spanish climber Francisco Marin climbed 5.14 at the age of 61.

But at 65, Bill Ramsey appears to be the oldest known person to climb 5.14. And perhaps thanks to some cryptic techniques, he’s managed to be the most consistent at the grade.

Who is this hard-climbing philosophy professor?

Born in 1960, Bill Ramsey grew up just 25 miles from Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park. From the farm where he lived, he could see the volcanic tuft of Smith. His father climbed there and kept climbing magazines on the coffee table. In high school, Ramsey and his friend Alan Watts would explore the local rock.

Ramsey climbed around Smith until the early `80s, when he, along with other locals, figured the area was climbed out. “Sport climbing didn’t exist in those days,” recalls Ramsey. He didn’t share the vision of bolting faces on rappel held by Watts, the father of American sport climbing. So Ramsey left Smith to pursue an academic career, earning a PhD in philosophy. He chose to follow the rigors of school rather than rock.

In the late `80s, Ramsey took a job at the University of Notre Dame. In the corn fields of Indiana, Ramsey felt lost without climbing. The sandstone found him first at Foster Falls in Southern Illinois, then a few years later at Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Meeting Porter Jarrard, a formative local climber at the Red, and exploring this untapped area outside of Lexington reignited Ramsey’s passion.

“That’s when I shifted my focus into climbing and working my way up the grades,” Ramsey tells me at the crag.

In June of 1998, Ramsey took advantage of a cold wind at his old stomping grounds of Smith Rock to send Badman, his first 5.14, in Aggro Gully. Two years later, while on sabbatical, he sent his second 5.14: F-Dude at the Virgin River Gorge in Arizona.

Over the decades, Ramsey racked up more and more hard ascents. In the past 25 years, he’s climbed around 30 5.14s. He put up the first 5.14b/8c in the United States: Super Tweak in Utah’s Logan Canyon. In the Red River Gorge, he made the first ascent of Transworld Depravity (5.14a). The list goes on: Golden (5.14b) at the Cathedral in the Utah Hills, Reverse Polarity (5.14b) at his beloved Clear Light Cave, and, most recently, Ghost Meat.

Behind his impressive record on rock is his main philosophy: “More is more.” Uncle Bill insists that doing more work always leads to improvement. It’s hard to argue with his success.

Ancient trance, screaming barfies, and a giant Q-tip

It’s unclear when Bill Ramsey stopped progressing, but in the past few years, he’s stagnated. It’s not that his climbing has stalled—he’s still holding strong at the 5.14 level. Rather, I’m talking about his identity as a human in the modern era. Over time, he’s morphed into that weird uncle who has refused to adapt to change.

Last September, Ramsey started hiking to the Clear Light Cave to stick-clip up Ghost Meat and begin working the moves. With every session, the skinny sexagenarian pushed his high point, trying to match a bad undercling from the ground. Everyone rooted for him. Unfortunately, though Ramsey continued progressing on his project, his musical taste had plateaued hard.

“Music for your mind, body, and soul,” breathed a female voice from a speaker at the base of Ghost Meat. “Nocturnal. Matt Darey. Music for the connoisseur.” Uncle Bill was playing the English trance producer Matt Darey’s Nocturnal podcast every time we went to the crag.

When we complained about the constant thump-thump-thump, Ramsey responded, “You guys can play some of your music!” But no one knew how to interface with Uncle Bill’s archaic technology. He used a two-decades-old iPod shuffle connected to what looked like a gramophone. And Uncle Bill couldn’t figure out how to use Bluetooth. So we climbed to the beat of ancient trance from the turn of the millennium.

Perhaps it’s Uncle Bill’s lack of desire to upgrade that makes him such a good climber. Instead of wearing downturned Solution Comps like everyone else at the crag, Ramsey dons board-lasted shoes that Five Ten had discontinued shortly before the Nixon presidency. His cotton grey tank top marks the only departure from his normally all-black spartan aesthetic. Yet his dated apparel contrasts with his innovative techniques.

“It weighs 2.5 pounds,” Ramsey says of the cooler full of ice that he constantly hikes to the Clear Light Cave. After climbing Jumbo Pumping Hate (5.14a) at California’s Clark Mountain, Golden, and other routes, a realization dawned upon him. “Many of the hard routes have a warm-up section where I would go numb,” he explains of his fingers, “and then I would thaw out with hand warmers on rests.” Ramsey notes that he needs to numb out, then let his hands thaw. This prevents them from freezing while gripping the cold rock.

So he has invented a freeze-thaw technique wherein he dons latex gloves, buries his hands in ice cubes for 10-15 minutes, and reheats them before every burn on his project. He wants to go through the screaming barfies before getting on the rock. The bro-science behind his practice seemed dubious with a sample size of one. Wearing tin foil to stop radio waves seems perhaps more well researched. Maybe his tactics do work for him. But nobody wants to hike ice to the crag and go through the pain that Uncle Bill willingly endures to find out.

The philosopher-climber also has more traditional tactics. When poor weather hits the crag, he takes cotton balls and tapes them to the wall to navigate the flow of seepage around the holds. This very practice helped him achieve success on Ghost Meat. He also has been known to attach cotton balls to the end of a stick brush, creating a giant Q-tip to dry the wall.

More than anything, Ramsey always has a Plan B, which is to make Plan A work. If the weather was bad during his most recent project, he would work on the simulator he made of Ghost Meat in his garage. Though weather rarely shut him down. He would just make different links, or work on getting just 3% better on any sufficiently dry or protected move or section.

The trophy for Bill Ramsey 

Despite becoming more of a tactician over the decades, Bill Ramsey keeps winning the prize for an aging athlete: atrophy.

“I can’t climb two days in a row anymore,” explains Ramsey, who had a full hip replacement a few years ago. “One day off is more like no days off. Two days off is more doable.” After driving home from the crag, he cramps up and pounds magnesium, potassium, and pickle juice. It’s hard to tell if the latter helps with recovery or is just another Uncle Bill quirk.

On the day before a heinous snow storm that shut down Vegas climbing for a week in February, Ramsey hiked to the Clear Light Cave. My friends and I had all decided not to climb that day, because the forecast looked horrible. But Uncle Bill remained dedicated to making Plan A work, bringing along his friend Steven to belay. After 100 attempts on Ghost Meat, he finally sent the route that day.

Ramsey plans on continuing his warpath. Immediately after crushing Ghost Meat, he began working on Friendly Fire, a 5.13d/14a at the nearby Blue Diamond Cave. He’s aiming for a year of two 5.14s and two 5.13+s.

After he tops Friendly Fire, he’ll do some early season sessions at Mount Charleston to shop around for a summer project. He suspects that geriatric climbers like himself will continue crushing. “As top-level climbers like Yuji Hirayama, Steve McClure, and Chris Sharma get older,” Ramsey reflects, “I predict in the near future, someone like that will climb 9a[5.14d] in their `60s, and eventually 5.15[9b] at that age, which will be super cool.”

On the car ride home from the crag, after seeing Uncle Bill hiking with his porta-potty, Jonathan Siegrist, Alex Honnold, Sam Stroh, and I talked about how nice it was to run into him. At his age, it felt like a miracle to see him at all. Perhaps all the hard climbing keeps him young. Maybe the key to keeping a twinkle in your wrinkles is regularly sending 5.14. We started training that night.

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