"The
Story of Longs", 22nd of August, 2013.
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| At the summit 10:30 AM |
I wake up at 1:15 AM a
little less than 36 hours after having done my first 14er, Mt. Elbert.
I'm barely rested from my previous expedition. Everything has been
packed since 6:00 PM the previous day. I roll out of bed and scramble
around in the dark to find a healthy snack to eat before leaving. I find
an orange, and some whole grain crackers to eat. I look out the window of
my kitchen and see an almost full moon and the mountain that I am about to
climb. It hasn't really soaked in yet, what my partner and I are planning
on doing. I put on my Carhart pants, my hiking socks, three shirts, my
Marmot climbing jacket, my thick mountain socks, my Merrel boots, my Subaru
beanie, and my thick synthetic gloves. I grab my backpack and my hiking
poles, and fill my two quart sized Nalgene water bottles to the brim. I
pull an apple and some other snacks out of the fridge and stuff them into my
pack on top of my rain jacket, my survival medical kit, and my waterproof/freeze
proof camera. It's about 1:45 AM now. I turn the light on for the
stairs, walk down and open the door. My first greeting is the sound of
coyotes and cold mountain air blowing down from the highest peaks. I
start to close the door, and realize that I've forgotten my keys and my
sunglasses. I leave my pack by the door, walk back up the stairs, and
start trying to locate my keys in the dark so that I don't wake up my
roommates. I finally locate them, along with a few other items that I'd
left off the list, and run back down the stairs to the car. I put my bag
in the back along with my hiking poles. No sign of my hiking partner,
Gardner, yet. After a few minutes he comes out with his Columbia jacket,
hat, and backpack. I open the trunk and put the backpack in, and Gardner
realizes that he's forgotten his gloves. He runs back to his room to grab
the gloves and some additional food, and I realize that I'd forgotten my head lamp. The almost full moon is high and bright in the sky, but I know
that it will be dark until we get above tree line. We finally get around to heading out around 2:00 AM for a 20 minute drive to the trail head in the
Outback, a good vehicle for this occasion.
On the way to the trail
head, up on the road heading to Longs Peak, we encounter many animals.
First there was a large rabbit that crossed right after a switch back. Then
there were some squirrels and a flock of birds, and later we see a deer near the
road. I drive slowly up the mountain road towards the trail head at 9,500
ft. We arrive 2:15 am. We are beginning to realize what we are
about to embark on. Neither of us says a word to each other. We don
our packs, check everything out one last time, and head out for the unknown by
the light of moon. I decide to leave the hiking poles behind, a wise
decision. The moon is high in the sky, but obscured
by some dark clouds. Everything looks dark in the night.
We pass the sign at the
trail head, warning of "quickly changing mountain weather". We
walk up the trail with our head lamps blazing on high. This part is much
less steep than the trail up Mt. Elbert that I'd done two days before. It's around 2:40 AM the first time I think to check my
watch. We've only been gone around 20 minutes. I'm satisfied
though, because we've already covered a lot of ground. I'd read in the
pamphlet about the hike; that the first part isn't that difficult. We
keep going, and every 25 minutes or so we walk over to the edge of the trail
and pull out our water bottles to take a swig. We keep walking and fairly
soon we're above tree line. Along the way we are passed by a few people,
but we pass just as many. One guy stops and talks to us for a minute.
He says that he's attempted Longs before, but was chased off by the
weather and his injured knee. He also says that he has trouble with
altitude sickness when he gets up real high. We nod and wish him good
luck, as he does the same for us. We keep chugging along at what feels
like a fairly reasonable pace. After all we've been living in Estes Park,
Colorado (7,500 ft.) for 3 months already. We are adequately acclimatized
for this expedition.
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| "By the Light of the Moon" |
We keep on hiking and
make it above tree line. I look at my watch and it's about 3:30 AM now.
We take a quick break and keep heading upward. The moon is our
guide and the wind is at our back. We travel quickly. After a few
more minutes we get to a fork in the road. One sign says, "No short
cutting," and the other says, ""Longs Peak," to the right,
and "Chasm Lake," to the left. We take the path to the right
towards the peak. After another hour or so, we stop for a long break at
some boulders. The elevation gain has been significant already.
We can look down and see the outline of trees in the dark. We also
witness a sea of snaking lights on the trail both behind us and ahead of us.
These are other climbers looking to complete the same physically
exhausting task as we are. After a few more minutes we keep on trudging ahead
towards our first major obstacle, "the boulder field." It's
about 4:30 AM now.
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| The Boulder Field on Longs |
After another hour and
fifteen minutes, we reach the recognizable edge of the boulder field. The
trail starts to become rocky at first, and then gradually starts to disappear
altogether. We reach the edge of the camping area. This is for
those that have elected to take two days to climb the mountain, instead of
doing all 16 miles at once. We stop for a break at the camp. The
tent sites are all surrounded by short 3 foot high rock walls. This is to
help keep the mountain elements out. In the distance, to the left, is a
wall of crumbling granite. To the right is an expanse of empty rough
terrain covered by small boulders. There are also two small buildings
with solar panels on their roofs. These are none other than solar powered
toilets, for those in need of a last bathroom break before going through,
"the keyhole." It's about 6:30 AM now. We look behind us
and the sun is rising above the boulder field, beckoning us onward.
As we are climbing up towards the keyhole, the going gets tougher.
Finally when we get near it there is a round weather hut built
into the solid rock wall. We climb through the door, sit for a few
minutes, and take a picture before getting up again. We read the sign warning
of the dangers that lie ahead beyond the key hole. I can tell you after
reading that sign, and climbing that mountain, that it is an understatement.
Beyond that point you venture into the unknown, the mountain gets
steeper, and it gets wilder. Finally we are at the keyhole.
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| "The Weather Hut" |
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| Longs, "The Key hole" |
It's about 7:00 AM now. We climb through the keyhole and are immediately
met by a 2500 foot drop off a ledge on the other side. We look to the
left and see a red circle with a yellow bull’s-eye in the center about two feet
across. These bull's-eyes will be our guiding beacons along the trail from now on
until the summit. We look and can see the next half mile of the trail.
It follows along this ledge at 13,000 feet above sea level, up and down
constantly over and around boulders. At some points we were hanging
from metal spikes above certain death half a mile below. Welcome to,
"the ledges."
We keep on heading forward and forever upward, mind you it is also getting much
more difficult to breath. The air pressure is much lower here than at sea
level. The oxygen is starting to get scarcer, and we can feel it in every
breath. It's hard to move our legs up here. Each step feels like we
might be walking on the moon, and the terrain must not be far from it. We
keep climbing up and down the ledges and after at least an hour we can see
"the trough." The trough is a 600 foot tall ladder of loose
boulders rolling down the back of Longs Peak. It is a little after 8:00
AM now.
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| "The Trough" |
We reach the trough and
look up towards the mountain. "How long do you think it'll take us?
About 45 minutes," my partner replies. Well it actually took
closer to an hour and a half. Boulders four feet high went upward
seemingly forever. The higher we climbed, hands over knees, the tougher
it was to keep going. The air got thinner and we were more and more
exhausted. We kept on trudging along, and gradually we could see progress
being made. Loose rocks were dislodged and rolled hundreds of feet down
the cliff. Some of them landed near the lake thousands of feet below.
At this point, maybe because of fatigue, or maybe because of something
else, I noticed that my mind was completely on the task at hand. My body
thought for itself, and things such as where to put my hand next, and which
rocks were sturdy enough to hold my weight without being dislodged; ran through
my head. Finally we neared the top and there lied the next obstacle,
"the notch". The going just got tougher and tougher. It
was now 9:15 AM.
The notch was this boulder, fifteen or twenty feet high, lodged between two
cliff faces ten feet apart. It turned out to be one of the most
formidable obstacles yet. The sections thus far had been class II in the
boulder field, and class III (any climbing that can be done un-roped) ever
since the key hole. The notch could have been labeled class IIII
(requiring ropes) if it was any higher or longer. The face of this giant boulder
was almost completely smooth, except for a few thin indentations in the rock
about a quarter inch deep. They were just deep enough to get your finger
tips and toes into place and push upwards to the next one. Here my mind
was completely into the task, choosing which point to go towards next, not even
thinking about falling. There was no time to consider falling. If
some unfortunate person were to stop and think, or not have enough confidence
in his or her bodies’ choice of anchor, they would certainly fall. I
stood there studying the rock face for a few minutes, trying to decide where to
start. After all, I had never done this before. I was inexperienced
to say the least, and had no rope to help anchor me. I pulled myself up a
few times with my fingertips testing the hold out. When I felt confident
enough to give it a shot, I went for it. I pushed upwards with my strong
leg muscles, and pulled with my arms mainly to maintain balance. I made
it three or four feet off the ground and then slid back down, luckily to a
standing position. Just then an experienced climber, with a much lighter
pack than mine, came up behind me and offered to help me get started. He
told me, "You need to have confidence in your body. It knows where
to go. If you don't have confidence, that's when trouble lurks."
I set one boot into place and tested it. I looked upward and
studied the rock face again for a few seconds, and pushed upward. I only
had to stop once think about where to go next. My body did know where to
go. I learned a valuable lesson. If you don't have confidence in
the task at hand, and full focus on it, then it becomes ten times more
dangerous and difficult than it would have otherwise been. I make it to
the top where my partner was waiting, and was greeted by another 1500 foot drop
a few feet in front of me, and a narrow ledge to the right snaking around a
cliff. This was “the narrows." It was now 9:35 AM.
The narrows were not the
most memorable part of the climb to me. They were a set of high ledges with
an enormous drop, which was even steeper than the previous sections of the
climb. It was very similar to the ledges except that it was even steeper and
only a foot and a half wide in most sections. We did see some other more
experienced climbers that passed us along the way. They stopped on a
ledge just before the final section for a break. We stopped and chatted
with them for a few moments and discovered that one of the toughest parts of
the entire climb was literally just around the corner. The final section
was called, "the homestretch". The minute that I laid eyes on
it, I was ready to turn around and forget the summit. It was now 9:55 AM,
and we'd been hiking and climbing for seven and a half hours now. It just
kept going on, and kept getting more difficult until it caught up to me, near
the end.
I looked up and saw the
steepest part of the climb right in front of me. There were 400 feet of
steep cliffs right in front of me. Below the narrows, where I was standing, the cliffs kept going down as far as you could see. Being afraid of
heights, it was one of the most terrifying situations that I can remember being
in since I was a kid. My heart was pounding doubly fast now because of
fear and the thin air. I had a vague memory of a 15 story metal staircase
in Mammoth Cave when I was a kid. I visualized looking down through the grating of the
stairs, a hundred and twenty feet down. That was nothing compared to this
situation.
It was like a giant ladder over 100 yards high with uneven
steps 5 to 7 feet high. I watched as other climbers started their way up.
There were cracks in the rock that ran beside these nearly vertical
steps. At the top of each step there was an area to stand on while
leaning into the cliff face. I watched as Gardner started his way up.
Everyone that had made it this far was passing us now. The climbers
below our level, and most of the ones at our level, had turned around a long time
ago.
I began to follow my
partner up the cliff. I had to stop and catch my breath every few
minutes. I kept on going and never looked down once. I didn't go on
auto pilot, but something close to it. I concentrated on the route, as
the yellow and red bull's-eyes could not be seen as clearly due to obstructed views from the cliff face and the sun. As I reached
the final 20 meters of climbing, I watched as Gardner climbed over the last
stair and put his feet on the largely flat summit. He looked back once to check
on my progress, and then sat on a stone at the top to take a break. It was
10:20 AM now, and I was less than five minutes from the top. I kept going
and climbed over the last stair. For the first time I looked up into the sky to
give thanks, and I noticed that grey clouds were beginning to obscure it. I
looked back and saw a cairn marking the end of the keyhole route and the edge
of the summit. I walked over utterly exhausted and sat beside my friend
on a boulder. I looked around and saw about 30 other people on the summit
doing the same thing. We were not alone in our endeavor. Our summit time
was around 10:25 AM, eight hours after leaving the car 5000 vertical feet
below.
Once we were up there we
finally began to relax a little. We talked with a climber that had been
to Gardner's home island of Taiwan, and he spoke some Taiwanese with him. I looked over the opposing edge of the
peak, which was the opposite side from the one we had summited. I looked down several
thousand feet below and saw a crystal blue lake. It was Chasm Lake.
It was quite a sight from up so high! I was glad to be able to see
that at least. The grey clouds kept rolling in. They obscured the
possible 120 mile/360 degree view from the peak. On the clearest of days
you can supposedly see into Wyoming, and even to edge of Nebraska from
the peak. Not today though, not today. It wasn't meant to be.
I got up and walked over to find the geographical marker; the small round
metal disk that had been there over a hundred years. The one that marked
the exact summit of 14,255 ft., re-measured later at 14,259 ft. above sea
level. It was on top of a boulder 4 feet high near the center of the
peak. Gardner snapped a photo of it.
I looked over the edge
and down the ladder of the home stretch. My stomach churned in my throat.
I put one foot over the edge and started my decent. It was rough
going; the opposite of going up. My strong legs were not as useful going
down. I had to use my less conditioned upper body to lower myself.
I tried not to think of the three thousand foot drop. The
homestretch went fairly quickly though. The narrows weren't too horrible
either. We got to the notch, and that was just as tough going down as it
was going up. I slid down slowly using my finger tips and boot heals to
slow the decent slightly. Now six feet of the trough was in front of us.
It was really awkward at first. We kind of did the crab walk down
the loose boulders to keep from falling. Our arms were exhausted.
We were exhausted. We had to stop every 5 minutes, sometimes
sooner, to keep from running completely out of energy.
About half of the way
down while lowering myself over a boulder, one of my water bottles wedged
itself loose. I could feel it slide out of the holster. Luckily it
was already empty. It fell about thirty feet and bounced on a boulder,
gaining speed, before bouncing over and over again down the mountains' back.
I watched silently. Someone up above yelled, "Don't go get
it!!", like I was ever really thinking about it. It kept on bouncing
until it was out of sight and I couldn't hear it anymore. Eventually it
must have rolled all the way down to the lake far below. I'll never know.
I'm glad it was just a water bottle. We kept on going. It was
almost 1:00 PM by now.
We made it to the base
of the trough and only had the ledges to go before climbing through the keyhole
into the class II boulder field. The clouds were getting thicker by the
minute, and we couldn't see as well anymore. We picked up the pace
slightly on the ledges, as much as we could anyway. I had no desire of
plummeting off the edge. We went up and down following the bull's eyes,
which we couldn't see as well from this direction. We made it near enough
to be able to see the key hole. Almost all of the people were on their
way down now. We met a man looking for someone that had gone ahead of
him. He asked when we had left the peak. We told him around 11:00
AM. It was now almost 2:00 PM. I never found out if he found the
people he was looking for. We were tired and kept on the decent.
We climbed through the
key hole, and were on our way down the steepest part of the boulder field, when
the clouds broke all hell on us. There was thunder in the distance and
then a little rain, which quickly changed over to hail. I was just happy that
we were finished with the climbing part and back down to the flatter boulder
field. However, there was no real trail through the boulder field. We
went down a little further holding our hands over our heads with our rain coats
on. The hail stung like bees. Then we noticed that we couldn't see
the far edge of the boulder field any more. The fog had begun to roll in.
We quickened our pace since we had already left the weather hut up behind
us. The air started getting cooler. We kept on going and the fog
just got thicker. We could no longer see the summit of Longs behind us.
We were disoriented, (not lost!) and stuck in the middle of a three
quarter mile long boulder field. We just walked and climbed over boulders
for at least an hour, while it hailed on us. The fog lifted a little
after 3:00 PM. We had gone in the relatively correct direction. We
were just off course a little. At one point, while were disoriented, we
think that we were somewhere on the edge of Storm peak. Storm peak is one
of the other lower mountains that straddled the boulder field. We won't
know where we were; ever. But we made it out without being struck by lightning or
frozen, or being "lost" and freezing to death. Everything was
good. It must have been 3:45 PM by the time we made to the edge of the
boulder field.
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| "Longs the Celebration", the next day. |
It was
a good thing to do once, but neither of us had the desire to do it again anytime
soon! -August 22nd, 2013.
~ Nick Whittemore
(October 30th, 2013).
~ Pictures by Gardner Nie & Nick Whittemore
A few of the things that I'll remember the most about this are things which occurred on the way down the mountain.
I'll forever hear the bouncing of my water bottle down each boulder of the trough gaining speed, and growing fainter and fainter. It will remind me of the stomach churning feelings of fear on the way down. Secondly, I'll remember the flowers in the boulder field after the fog retracted, and the hail ceased. I'll remember the haunting sound of the chilling winds on the ledges overhanging the two-thousand foot drop. No matter how confident that you are, you can't really do things like this on your own. If it weren't for Gardner I would have turned around several times. It is a testament to the power of encouragement & teamwork.
A few of the things that I'll remember the most about this are things which occurred on the way down the mountain.
