EP 259: Randy Leavitt — Developing 1000+ New Routes, the Anti-dirtbag Lifestyle, and Why the Best Day of Surfing Beats Climbing

The Nugget Climbing Podcast

Steven Dimmitt

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4.2 • 576 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 122 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Randy Leavitt is a climbing pioneer, prolific route developer, pilot, and surfer. We talked about training on the Dune Cracks with Tony Yaniro, inventing the Leavittation offwidth technique, his journey from mountaineering to sport climbing, bolting Jumbo Love and other famous routes, why money equals freedom, his passion for surfing, reflections from almost drowning, aging gracefully, and much more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friends, and welcome to the Nugget Climbing Podcast. This is your host, Stephen Dimmit. My guest
0:07.5	today is Randy Levitt. Randy is a living legend. He is a very prolific root developer. He estimates
0:15.3	he's developed more than a thousand new routes, which is insane. And he was also an amazing climber in his time. He started climbing
0:22.2	in the 70s when he started, I think the hardest routes in the world were 512, mid 512, something like
0:27.4	that. And he ended up climbing as hard as 514B at the height of his career. Randy is also a passionate
0:34.6	surfer and a pilot. And we talked about both of those things quite extensively in this conversation.
0:41.3	I really enjoyed this one.
0:42.5	I've had several chats with Randy over the last couple months, getting to know him.
0:47.2	I really like the way he thinks and appreciate his perspective.
0:50.3	And I think he's got a really refreshing worldview within the world of climbing. So again, lots of good stuff in this one. Please enjoy Randy Levin.
0:59.0	Well, Randy, Cass, really fun to prep for this.
1:15.6	Leading into this conversation, I was thinking about talking to you and realized that I know you
1:21.5	really well by reputation, but I didn't actually know that many of the specifics, you know,
1:26.6	like I'd heard many times about
1:28.2	Book of Hate when people would climb that route. I think I first saw it in one of the dosage
1:33.4	movies, Dosage 5 with Beth Rodden climbing it, and this famous Randy Levitt Root and horse
1:38.4	latitudes and, you know, in King Lines, you were the one that discovered Clark Mountain and bolted jumbo
1:44.5	love. And so I knew about your significance to some degree as a developer and pioneer, but it just
1:53.1	lit up my curiosity to prep for this because I just, you know, there's a lot about you on the
1:57.9	internet, but not the full story of any of these things.
2:01.0	So I just got to kind of collect these topics and questions and whatnot.
2:05.6	So I'm really looking forward to diving in today.
	...

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