Posted on September 12, 2008 - at 7:00 am

Chris Sharma Sends Clark Mountain Super Project: Jumbo Love (5.15b)

Photo: Randy Leavitt

The Big Up Blog is reporting that Chris Sharma has climbed the fabled project at California’s Clark Mountain.  This was the route featured in King Lines that had sick aerial shots of Sharma taking massive whippers on the 200+ ft. line.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite pull it off at the time.  Yesterday, Sharma put it all together:

Chris returned to the States this summer fitter than ever and with full focus on the Clark Mountain project. About ten days ago he had a breakthrough attempt, getting a few moves below the lip of the cave. He called us to let us know he was close, and B and Coop flew out to try and catch the send. Last week it hit 100 degrees in Vegas, and conditions were not ideal for limit climbing, but on Thursday, 9/11 it all came together, he owned every hold, did every sequence exactly right, and topped out his hardest, proudest route.

No mention of a grade or name right now, but this route is clearly a contender for one of the hardest routes in the U.S.  You have to give a lot of credit to Randy Leavitt for having the vision to bolt this route over 10 years ago!

For more information, here are a few old posts I had about this route:

• Back in June of 2007, a futuristic project at Clark Mt. was mentioned in Ethan Pringle’s blog.
• Later in June of 2007, Mike Call mentioned that he had been helping film this new route, calling it “one of the most impressive chunks of rock I’ve ever seen”.
• Then in July of 2007, I had some background on the climbing at Clark Mt. and how it all got started.
• And finally, late in 2007 Ethan Pringle and Dave Graham ventured out to Clark Mt. to give the project a try.  Ethan’s efforts in particular helped remove some of the mystique surrounding the route as he was able to quickly make some significant links on the route.  You can see footage of them working the route in the archives at MVM.