The World Was Trying to Tell This Hiker He'd Won a Nobel. He Had No Service.

Fred Ramsdell was in the Wyoming backcountry when the Nobel Prize committee made its announcement.

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Nobel Committee Secretary General Thomas Perlmann (R) addresses journalists in front of a screen displaying the portraits of (L-R) Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi during a press conference where the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are being announced. (Photo: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / Contributor / AFP via Getty)

One day in 2011, I was hiking in Culvert Canyon, a dry wash with soaring walls just outside of Moab, when my phone rang. When I picked up, Joe Spring, then the online editor at Outside, where I had been interviewing for a job, greeted me.

“I have great news,” he said. “I’ve talked with the editor-in-chief, and—”

The connection cut. Deep in the belly of the canyon, my half-bar of service had suddenly flickered out; when I tried to dial his number, a computerized voice informed me that my call could not be completed. For the next 15 minutes, I picked my way up and around the rock walls, searching for any signal. Finally, standing on a ledge about a hundred feet above the canyon bottom, I got through and found out that I had gotten a full-time job at my favorite magazine.

It was a life-changing call, and because of my penchant for wandering around outside of cell coverage, I nearly missed it. So I have a lot of sympathy for Fred Ramsdell, a hiker who, for most of a day, had no idea he had just won a Nobel Prize.

Ramsdell, a researcher now at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, will split the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Mary E. Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University. The trio researched what’s called “peripheral immune tolerance.” In the simplest terms, it’s the systems and processes in the body that prevent it from attacking its own tissues. The three identified a type of cell, called a regulatory T-cell, that is key to that tolerance. Their work, which could have applications in preventing and treating cancer and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, earned the three the $1.1 million award.

While Sakaguchi and Brunkow learned about the prize when the committee announced it on Monday, no one was able to reach Ramsdell. The reason: He was off-grid in Wyoming, where he and his wife had been hiking and camping. Jeff Bluestone, CEO of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that he had not been in touch with Ramsdell since he left on the trip in late September.

Ramsdell did eventually find out about his success, but only when he returned to civilization. That morning, he had woken up to find some 6 inches of snow at their remote campsite. When he and his wife reached a small town that afternoon, he told the Journal, she looked at her cell phone and started screaming so loudly that Ramsdell thought she had seen a grizzly.

From one hiker to another, congratulations, Dr. Ramsdell, and I hope you enjoyed your trip: It seems like it’s the last chance you’ll have to unplug for quite a while.