A Full Life

Happy Wednesday and happy fall! Colorado officially had its first snowfall two weeks ago, it’s 57°F in Denver as I’m writing this, and all is right in the world.

Now to address the elephant in the room: its come to my attention that there’s a subset of people who think cold brew is a drink reserved for the hot months, so as we approach cold months please allow me to make myself clear: cold brew is a year round drink. You can pry mine from my cold, dying hands when Denver freezes over.

Backcountry Chronicles

Ohhhhh MAN. Here comes an edition I’ve been itching to write since June — let’s talk Longs Peak!

This is your fair warning that this newsletter is pretty photo heavy. I wanted to walk through every section of the hike and talk through the technicality of some sections, and I needed photo references to do that (plus, I’m super proud that I finally took this one on, so I’ll take any excuse to show off my photos).

To take it alllll the way to the beginning, I’ve wanted to climb Longs since well before I moved to Denver. Longs Peak sits in Rocky Mountain National Park and is part of the Denver skyline, so she’s been tempting me since I first flew into DIA in college. I mean… LOOK at that view.

My hiking partner moved back home in July (Hi, Emily! I love you!!!!) and my boyfriend, Alex, knew I’d been itching to climb Longs and finally felt ready. The only problem was: I have a slight issue with wigging myself out about exposure when I’m alone, so he knew I more than likely wouldn’t do it alone (spoiler alert: he was right). So he got me the potential best birthday gift ever and paid for a guide to take me up Longs.

He filled out an intake form back in June and explained to Colorado Mountain School, the company he commissioned the guide through, my fitness level and experience so they had a decent idea of who I should be paired up with.

I should also mention that I was adamant about doing this hike with another female. I’m sure all of the male guides they employ are awesome and I would’ve had a great time with them, but in my opinion, there’s nothing better than doing something extremely physically demanding with another female. I’ve made endless attempts at putting the feeling and energy into words but I just can’t — it’s so tangible and so electric. That mutual feeling of “we’re freaking doing it” coupled with the ego high of passing packs of dudes on the way up.

All that to say, once I was paired with a guide, Meg, we chatted on the phone a few days before about the timing for the 14ers I’ve done so far and decided we’d be fine to start around 4AM (vs. the aforementioned 1AM start time). Longs has one hiking route up/down and infinitely many climbing routes. I always assumed we’d be taking the hiking route up and down, but Meg suggested that if I was going up with a guide, I should take advantage of that and do something I wouldn’t normally do on my own — and with that, we planned to take the Keyhole Route (standard hiking route) up and the North Face/Cables Route down (a climbing route).

The trailhead is a little over an hour and a half from my house in Denver, so I was planning on car camping close to the trailhead the night before. The stars aligned when I reached out to a friend-of-a-friend who lived in Estes Park and asked if they knew any good car camping spots, and to my surprise, they said “Don’t car camp — just stay in our guest room!”

Thanks to that extremely generous offer, I was able to avoid a 2AM wake up and get another glorious hour of sleep. I got to Estes Park around 8PM, mapped that their house was about 25 minutes from the trailhead, popped a melatonin, and set my alarm for 3AM.

The morning of the hike, my alarm went off at 3AM and I shot out of bed as if it were Christmas morning. I got ready in about 20 minutes (brushed my teeth, washed my face, put on sunscreen, got dressed, and all the other basic necessities I’d written out on my to-do list the night before because I don’t trust my brain that early in the morning) and hit the road. I was at the trailhead by 3:45AM and met up with my guide right around 4AM — we coincidentally parked right next to each other and realized after about 10 minutes that we were both meandering around and clearly waiting for someone else.

We started off hot and immediately jumped into a few shortcuts (perks of going with a guide). We cut off about 2 miles total from the shortcuts, but it also meant we were taking on a lot of vertical gain right from the jump.

The parking lot for the trailhead sits right at 9,400 feet and we were above treeline (roughly 11,5000) just short of an hour. The shortcut we took was called the grove (as pictured below). Basically, the hike up to the base of Longs Peak involves traversing a ridge line on the outside of the bowl and taking the grove means going straight up the middle of that bowl instead of traversing.

We got to the top of that bowl to see our first glimpse of the actual peak right as the sun started to peek over the horizon. Please excuse the barrage of photos below — they’re just too good not to share:

Hands down my favorite sunrise to date. From here, we trekked through the boulder field to the keyhole (all the way to the right in the above photo). The route is named after the Keyhole because it’s where you enter the first real stretch of the hike. You go up and into the Keyhole, and then hike along the backside of Longs Peak before pushing to the summit all the way on the left side of the photo.

Once we got to the entrance of the keyhole, we put on harnesses and helmets. We originally planned to rope up for some of the more technical sections of the keyhole route and agreed that communication was key: if, at any point, I felt uncomfortable or outside of my comfort zone, I needed to tell my guide, Meg, and we’d rope up.

The backside of Longs is broken into 3 main sections: The Trough, The Narrows, and The Homestretch.

To put it bluntly, the trough sucked. It’s on the west side of the mountain, meaning it typically doesn’t get direct sunlight until later in the day (ie: it was cold). We layered up before we got through the keyhole and I was floored at how many layers we had on for how much physical activity we were doing — and I was never hot! The trough creates an almost unbroken, continuous line within a few hundred feet of the summit. All in all, the trough is roughly 700’ of vertical gain.

I put my phone in my backpack after I took the sunrise photo above, and didn’t take it back out until we were on the summit, so the one downside is I don’t have any time stamps on photos as a reference for what our timing was. What I do know is that I took the photo above, from the base of the boulder field, at 6:48AM and I took my first photo on the summit at 8:39AM, so all things considered, the boulder field, keyhole, trough, narrows, and home stretch took just under two hours.

Candidly, the worst part of the trough was how slippery the rocks are from so many hikers over the year, coupled with the loose gravel laid over those rocks. I lost my footing a few times and was silently saying thank you to our plan to descend down the North Face/Cables Route instead of back out the Keyhole Route. I honestly think the way down would’ve been more difficult than the way up.

One last detail for the photo above: if you’re wondering where the heck the trail is and how you stay on it, it’s conveniently marked by the bullseyes painted on some of the rocks above.

After the trough, you’re immediately rewarded with the spicy (but amazing) narrows. It’s essentially a catwalk alongside the edge of the mountain with minimal vertical gain and lots of exposure. To my surprise, I was feeling great about the exposure we’d had so far, so I ended up not asking for a rope at any point.

The narrows was probably my favorite part of the uphill. The first few moves are pretty technical and need to be taken with care, but once you’re through those, you’re mostly descending and taking in the insane views.

After the narrows, we got to the homestretch, which was pretty similar to the trough but just short enough that by the time I was feeling it in my legs, we were within 20 feet of the summit. There was a bit of traffic on the homestretch and it pretty easily bottlenecks, so we took our time so we didn’t crowd anyone ahead of us and practiced our rest steps (my favorite new trick).

At this point, I stopped looking up and just focused on my feet beneath me and the steps immediately ahead of me. I was at the mental part of the hike that looking up just made me feel more tired, so we reigned it in and hyper-focused.

And after the upper half of the homestretch, we summited! I should add a note on timing too — everything I read said that, on average, Longs takes about 6 hours to summit and 4 hours to descend. I told myself I’d be thrilled with anything around 6 hours for time to the summit.

Once we reached the summit, my guide, Meg, ran into another guide she works with who was, in her words, the “head honcho” at Colorado Mountain School. He was taking up a dude around our age and they summited about 4 people ahead of us. He remarked that he hadn’t seen us on the uphill and asked when we started. She told him we started at 4AM and his jaw just about hit the floor as he replied “You started at FOUR?!? We started at two!”. Cue Meg and I fist bumping as we realized we beat our expected time by 1.5 hours and made it from the trailhead to the summit in 4.5 hours.

We spent about 10 minutes on the summit and ate (see: demolished) our PB&J’s and immediately headed down the North Face/Cables Route. After dealing with a lot of the technical sections on the way up, we both felt great to scramble most of the way down and traversed about a half mile before we roped up and started to rappel.

It was my first time rappelling and, as expected, it was a freaking blast. It took us about an hour to get down three pitches - mostly because there was so much traffic and only so many cables drilled into the mountain, so we spent at least 45 minutes sitting around waiting for our turn.

From there, it was easy money back to the car. We trekked back through the boulder field, made it back to the treeline, through the forest, and to the parking lot. Our final stats ended up right around 12 miles and 5.6K vertical feet.

The last detail I have to add here: I spent the last two months listening to this song at the start of every single workout and visualizing myself listening to it in the car as I pulled out of the parking lot post-Longs. All I thought about was how amazing I’d feel after I was done and that visualization tactic started every single workout on such a high — whether it be walking, running, weight lifting, or whatever else.

So as I pulled out of the parking lot after the hike, I rolled down my windows, opened my sunroof, and played the song — and naturally started crying tears of joy. What a freaking day.

Artiste Break

No art this week, but here’s a little something I haven’t stopped thinking about ever since I saw it (shoutout to Kyla Scanlon’s newsletter).

To Go Snacks

🏕️ 90% of this newsletter was written while this “Fall Feels” playlist was ripping in the background.

⛰️ I’m kind of shocked I haven’t plugged this yet, tbh. One of my best friends in the world, Katie, started a Substack, Off Days, to write about anything but money (spoiler alert: writing about money is her full time job). Katie is truly my favorite author in the world and I promise it’s not just because she’s my friend — she’s also an incredible, incredible, incredible writer.

📝 I bought this journal a few weeks ago and I’m so, so excited about it. It’s a five year journal and the idea is you write a couple lines for every day of the year, with five blocks for each day, so you can see exactly what you were thinking about, doing, and feeling exactly one year ago as you write. Personal growth metrics for the win!

💄 You can inject any anti-beauty industry article directly into my veins, but especially this one about why your skin is probably better than you think.

Happy Fall!

- McCall 🌻

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