Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
Longs Peak (14,259 feet) is the first Colorado Fourteener I ever stood on top of. This storied mountain looms large over the northern Front Range, in particular its somber east face, home of the 1,000-foot Diamond. Topping out at 14,000 feet, the sheer granite wall today hosts a gear-protected 5.14, the Full Dunn-Westbay. But back in autumn 1987, when friends and I slogged up the peak via the third-class Keyhole Route, the hardest climbs would have been 5.12s, steep hand and finger cracks freed by the pioneering Boulder climber Roger Briggs.
Not that any of this would have mattered to me. I was a fledgling rock jock and mountaineer from the desert of New Mexico, a state whose highest point, Wheeler Peak, was a grassy 13,167 feet. The thought of going above 14,000 feet was novel and terrifying, and all 16-year-old me could do was glance up at the Diamond in horror when I trudged past the cutoff to Chasm Lake as dawn bathed the wall pink, wondering how it was that humans climbed such a precipice.
I’d come up to Colorado with a family friend, Steve, a grad student whom my dad would hire to babysit young miscreant, pothead me while he (my doctor father) was out of town for meetings and medical conferences. Steve’s girlfriend, Kris, had access to one of the few private residences in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), a family-owned cabin overlooking Moraine Park. Steve, Kris, and I had driven up from New Mexico, met her sister and her sister’s family (husband and two young daughters) in Denver, then driven up to the cabin to acclimate for one night before trying Longs.
***
By climber standards, the Keyhole Route is not much of anything, but by civilian standards, it’s an undertaking. You grind for six miles along an endlessly contouring, switchbacking trail, sneak through the Keyhole notch onto the peak’s west side, traverse some wide ledges, death-slog 600 vertical feet up a rockfall chute called the Trough, cross a tight ledge called the Narrows, then finally scramble up a series of low-angle ramps called the Homestretch. The top is unique, a football-field-sized plateau that’s the highest thing for miles, with 360-degree views of the Plains and the Rockies. I savored the view that day, even as my feet throbbed from hiking in skate shoes. All our group—minus one parent and the two little girls, who’d stayed behind—had summitted. But the climb was tiring, and we returned to the trailhead exhausted, sunburned, parched, and sore.
The website 14ers.com gives the Keyhole Route “high” exposure and commitment grades, and “considerable” risk of rockfall, all of which is true. Longs Peak will see fatalities most years, from people having heart attacks, to lightning strikes, to unroped falls on exposed terrain—sometimes caused by wind or the wet/snowy/icy conditions you’d expect at altitude. On an ascent of D7 in the late 1990s, my friend Chris and I watched from our belay stance as a helicopter buzzed over the Diamond, a body wrapped in a black tarp secured in a litter swinging below—a hiker who’d fallen to his death on the Keyhole Route, we’d later learn. We finished our ascent shaken by this grim vision, a reminder of the massive peak’s steely indifference to human life.
Still, some 15,000 to 20,000 people set out to climb Longs each year, per a 2018 study by the Colorado Fourteener Initiative, and it’s probably even more, post-pandemic. They’re not all well prepared, as evidenced by Longs’s 50-percent failure rate. As my friend Neil once joked about the goober packtrains on the trail, “Apparently all you need to climb Longs is a flashlight, a pair of jeans, a fuzzy canteen, a pocketful of granola bars, and a University of Nebraska sweatshirt”—a joke that’s funny because it’s true.
***
As challenging—or merely tedious—as an ascent of the Keyhole Route was, it was far from the crux of the trip. That came the next day, down on Estes Park’s obnoxious tourist strip, amidst T-shirt shops and fudge emporiums and curio stores hawking cheesy dreamcatchers and rubber tomahawks. It was here that I was dragged kicking and screaming to an Old West photoshoot I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget.
I’ve been accused, at various times, of not being goofy or spontaneous “enough,” as if there were some sort of official fucking goof-o-meter that measured “wackiness.” This usually makes people who fancy themselves spontaneous push me even harder to do whatever thing it is I don’t want to do. For example, when I was fourteen, at band camp, I had a mohawk because I was a skate punk. This convinced my metalhead camp counselor I’d be the perfect drummer for his air band during skit night, but boy, was he pissed when all I did was sit in the back holding my drumsticks, looking glumly out at the other campers while him and his hessian buddies “played” their hearts out on invisible guitars to some butt-rock power anthem. I am who I am, and I’ve realized I no longer need to make apologies or pretend. I’m not goofy; I’m not spontaneous. I don’t like doing things I don’t like doing. Things like going to Shelf Road or Indian Creek, paddle dynos, offwidth climbing, working, and talking to other human beings. You can’t make me.
So it was with the post–Longs Peak photo shoot, which Steve—a spontaneous guy—insisted we needed to do as a group to commemorate our climb.
“C’mon, Matt, it will be fun!” he said, at the cabin the next day. “All you have to do is sit there and look into the camera.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “I’m tired—I just want to stay here and read my book. Plus, I’m not a cowboy or whatever.”
“Well, then, you can be a soldier or an outlaw.”
“But I’m not those things either.”
“Well, can you pretend to be one for five minutes?”
“I’d rather not.”
Finally, Steve threw up his hands, sighed, and said, “Well, you have to.” Since he was driving and he was older than me and he was technically in charge, and since the trip had been his idea and we were staying in his girlfriend’s family cabin, I acquiesced. I mean, what choice was there? I didn’t want to seem like an ingrate.
The result you can see in the photo at the top of this story, and if you can’t tell which “pioneer” is me by the look of blackest misery on my face, then I suggest you visit an optometrist. I’m dressed as some sort of soldier—“Rifleman Dipshit, 10th Cavalry, Fort Dumbass”—but more than that, I cannot say. Worse yet, I’m being upstaged by two beaming little girls who look like extras on Little House on the Prairie and clearly would rather be no place else in the world. They are spontaneous. Everyone else seems to be having a great time too, with Steve, at the upper left, taking his role quite seriously. But me, I’m dragging the whole party down; they’d for sure toss me out of the covered wagon. And consider that this was the best of the photos, in which I look the “happiest” and that the photographer saw fit to print for our benefit, probably to the tune of some obscene amount of money just for stage-managing a few minutes of tourist cosplay.
The next year, in a way, I got my revenge on Steve on a return visit to Longs, forcing him out of his comfort zone as I guided him up the Cables Route (5.4), a single long, easy pitch up mellow cracks on Longs’s north face followed by a scramble to the summit. As I best recall, Steve enjoyed our climb more than I enjoyed the Old West photoshoot, but I can’t be sure—there were a few moments on the scramble when he seemed genuinely freaked out, looking back over his left shoulder at the abyss where the east face of Longs plunges 2,000 feet to Chasm Lake. In any case, there’s no photographic record, sepia-toned or otherwise. Only the most compromising photos, it seems, are the ones we keep around.
Matt Samet is a freelance writer and editor based in Boulder, Colorado, and the author of the Climbing Dictionary.