Top of the morning! Buckle up. We’ve got a long one today.

Last weekend, I checked off my personal Everest for the year and climbed the Cables Route on Longs Peak. It was a beast of a day in the best way possible, kicked off with a 1:30AM alarm. I usually average 1,200 words per newsletter and this one clocked in just north of 3,300 if that tells you anything.

My glutes are sore and my heart is happy.

I saw Longs Peak for the first time three years ago on a second date. We waltzed into The Woods, an awesome bar with nearly panoramic views of Denver’s city skyline and the Front Range mountains. Dinner turned into post-dinner cocktails; the natural progression of a mutually-agreed-upon-yet-unspoken “I think I like you.”

We stepped outside to admire the view of the mountains and my date said “See that really tall one, all the way to the right? That’s Longs Peak.” I knew nothing about the mountain, other than the obvious fact that it looked like an evil villain lair and therefore equated it with danger in my mind.

I went home and Googled the peak and learned it was not only longer than any hike I’d ever done, but also more vertical gain, more exposure, and more dangerous. Piqued interest slowly turned into obsession until I couldn’t stop thinking about Longs—and now, three years later, I like to think of as a little reminder in the skyline of my own growth.

Fast forward: last summer, I got a guided trip up Longs as a birthday gift (and wrote about it here). I knew I could do the hike, but especially a year ago when I didn’t have much (read also: any) class 3+ exposure experience, the thought of some of the more technical sections of the Keyhole Route really wigged me out.

The guide and I hopped on an intro call a few days before the hike and she threw out the idea of rappelling down the north face of the mountain instead of just hiking back out the south side. “If you’re taking the time to hire a guide, you might as well take advantage and do something you wouldn’t do otherwise” she reasoned. Interesting point, I thought.

A few days later, we rappelled down and thus began the love story between me and the sport of climbing.

The logical continuation took hold: I got a membership at Movement, went consistently throughout the winter, and somewhere along the way a seed was planted in my brain that it would be so cool to climb up the Cables Route on Longs Peak. The more I researched it, the more reasonable it felt.

It’s funny to attempt to trace back the origin of an idea and figure out the exact moment it came to fruition. For me, a moment that keeps coming to mind is being at lunch on my 30th birthday with one of my best friends and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend is, to put it bluntly, a psycho climber—and I mentioned after my first drink that I couldn’t get the thought of the Cables Route out of my head. Without a second of hesitation, her boyfriend immediately replied: “let’s do it.”

And we were off.

I should add here: knowing I was going with someone who was so experienced with outdoor climbing was exciting for a myriad of reasons. It felt like I was being guided again, but with a friend who I could ask a zillion questions to, open up to about being nervous, and also appreciate the comfort of being with a friend and enjoying a day.

Most of the big hikes I’ve done this summer have been around the 4K-5K vertical gain range. I’ve felt sore the next day, but never felt like I really hit my limit, so going into the day my goal was to push myself enough pace-wise, especially on the hike out when the climbing was done, that I felt like I hit my limit. In short: I wanted to end the day my tank on empty.

I managed to fall asleep at 7PM on Friday night (a process that honestly deserves it’s own newsletter, but for the sake of brevity the highlights include: dinner at 4:30PM, stopped drinking water at 5:30PM, putting on blue light glasses and putting away my phone, taking a melatonin at 6PM, and posting up next to my window and reading from 5:45-6:45PM. I got in bed at 7PM on the dot and against all odds, I was asleep within 20 minutes.

I reasoned that if I woke up in 3 hours and my body registered it as a nap, I was probably only going to get around 3 hours of sleep anyways if I fell asleep at a regular time. I did not expect to be fully unconscious for the night by 7:23PM, but I’ll take it as my gift from the Sleep Gods.

My alarm went off at 1:35AM. I’d love to say here that it hurt, I didn’t want to get out of bed, and it took me a few minutes to get up—but frankly, I flew out of bed. I’d been training for this day all summer.

I always weigh the pros-and-cons of getting less sleep and sleeping in my own bed vs. getting a few more hours and sleeping inside a tent or in the back of a car. I almost always opt for sleeping in my own bed, but I learned that morning that a 1:35AM alarm is definitely my personal limit.

After checking off the obligatory to-do list I made the night before (put on deodorant, brush your teeth, fill up your water) I met up with Matt, my climbing partner for the day and the aforementioned best friend’s boyfriend, around 2AM. We drove to the trailhead together, got there around 3:30AM and started hiking at 3:45AM.

This is where being guided the year prior paid off once more. The guide took me on a few shortcuts and because I tracked the hike on Strava, I was able to download the .gpx data from Strava and put it into CalTopo (my drug of choice) then overlay the traditional .gpx file from AllTrails with the standard hiking route. With that, we could see where the two paths deviated and re-find the shortcuts, and most importantly, cut off about 4 miles round trip.

We crushed about 2K of vert in an hour and a half, just switch backing over and over until we made it above tree line, at which point we looked at each other and said “We’re…. kind of crushing this” and I was officially smiling ear-to-ear about the day I was about to have.

Once we got to the turnoff for the second shortcut, we turned off the path, crossed the river, and then had the jump-scare of a lifetime when we came face-to-face with a bull moose. If we didn’t have headlamps on, we would’ve literally kicked it. Thankfully, the moose wasn’t too pissed off at us (or just too tired considering it was 5AM at this point), so our all-out sprint back to the main trail was uneventful.

We made it to the Boulder Field before sunrise and stopped at the bathrooms—which are still the craziest things in the world to me. Fuck AI; this is the greatest feat of modern engineering, in my opinion. A fully functioning bathroom at 12.8K elevation!

We hiked up the Boulder Field and rounded out the last 1,000ft of vertical gain via hiking and were rewarded with a beautiful view of The Diamond just as the sunrise was hitting it. Check her out.

By this point, it was COLD. If you’ve been to Rocky Mountain National Park before, you know how insanely windy it gets (and the subsequent wind crust we deal with all winter long). The way Longs is positioned, it creates a high-alpine tundra environment once you get above tree line. I have a pretty standard outfit that I wear every time I do a big hike in the high alpine (sun shirt, puffy, hat, backup beanie in the backpack, running gloves, leggings). For Longs, I always need an extra set of wind pants and a mid layer—and I’m always still freezing with them on. We huddled up behind a rock while we put on climbing harnesses, split up the climbing gear, and tested out all the tools to triple check everything before we got going. By the end of it, both of us had chattering teeth and mutually agreed that it was time to get a move on.

One other detail to note: the wall notoriously stays wet if it rains within a week, and then freezes over. It rained a few days before, so we went into it knowing that even though the route was only a 5.4 rating, it could very well be iced over and a little sketchy. Unfortunately, as we approached the wall, what we were scared of turned out to be our reality—but after a super honest discussion, we decided it was still in play.

The mantra of the day from that moment forward was slow and steady.

Editor’s note (and writer’s note, technically): I’m a big believer in over-communicating in high alpine, so I’ll be over-explaining the technical details from here forward.

My climbing partner headed up first and I was on lead belay. The biggest factor in my mind was making sure enough slack was out at all times. Truly, our greatest risk was him reaching up to clip a carabiner to a cable, not having enough slack, and essentially getting pulled off the wall by me. Yikes.

One nice detail about this route: it’s called the Cables Route because there are actual cables drilled into the mountain from the 20’s. The Cables Route was actually the primary route to get up the mountain with a via-ferrata-esque setup helping hikers clip in and easily get up to the summit. In the 70’s, the cable line was taken out because of how much it attracted lightning and put hikers in danger. The Keyhole Route was established, but the drilled cables stayed on the mountain. Because of that, we were able to just clip carabiners to the cables instead of relying on cams. I know cams are reliable as ever, but there’s a specific piece of mind with clipping into something that’s literally attached to the mountain.

Once my climbing partner got to the top, he hooked himself on a separate rope affixed to a cable bolted into the top of the wall and yelled out “I’m off belay.” From there, I unclipped the carabiner from my belay loop, freed the rope from the GriGri and yelled back “off belay” to confirm that the rope was free. I tied the end of the rope into my climbing harness and Matt pulled the rope all the way up.

At this point, all the extra slack was at my feet, and we needed it now pulled through so the extra slack was up by Matt and he could properly belay me. Once he pulled the rope through to the point that when he pulled, it pulled my harness, I yelled up “That’s me” to communicate that we reached the end of the rope and not that the rope was just stuck on a rock.

One of the coolest parts of this day was once I was starting to climb, I got such a fear-induced adrenaline rush about the conditions, and realized: I’ve never felt fear in this context before. It wasn’t hard to level myself with reason: you’ve got an inch of slack in this rope, you have a helmet on, you’re on belay. And the fear left as quickly as it came.

I made it up to the top without any falls or issues, just humbled by how much effort it took to climb an icy route. We were home free from that point on; we scrambled up to the top, sat up at the summit for 10-15 minutes and annihilated some snacks, then started the scramble back down.

Heading down, I was so, so unbelievably thankful for the CalTopo map I threw together. Every review I’ve read of the Cables Route says the hardest part is just finding the actual cables on your way up and down, and without a downloaded map, it would’ve been easy to get intro trouble.

Once we made it back to the top cable, we rappelled down the same single pitch that we climbed up. I went first, got down to the bottom and onto solid ground, unclipped myself, got the rope out of the GriGri and yelled up that I was off rappel. Unfortunately, right as I was finishing the rappel my favorite Nalgene in the world fell out my the side of my backpack and tumbled straight down the rest of the face of the mountain. I felt super lucky that it was a slow day on the route and there was no one else around; not so lucky that the water bottle split in half after colliding with a slab of granite. RIP to my child.

After that, it was pretty much smooth sailing for the rest of the day. I hid my poles behind a rock in the Boulder Field so I didn’t have to deal with them on the climb and marked the spot on my map so I was able to find them relatively easily. We ran most of the way down and then connected with the second shortcut and stayed on high alert for moose sightings.

Once we got below tree-line, we full out ran the entire rest of the route. Not only did it feel so great to absolutely crush the downhill with way faster mile splits, but the fact that my body was able to run after a day like that just felt euphoric. It was one of those moments where I was overflowing with gratitude for my body and what it can do.

I don’t have many rules in life, but one of them is if I come across a river after a hard hike, I have to dunk my face in it. No exceptions. When we got back to the river about 2 miles from the trailhead, not only did I dunk my face, but I dunked my entire hat to keep me cool for the last stretch. A perfect way to wrap up the day.

One of my favorite parts of long expeditions like that is how much closer you get to the friends you go with. I feel this every time I go for a long tour or hike with a close friend: it’s the shared experience of facing something really, really hard head-on and together, and getting to the other side. At the end of the day, hiking is essentially meaningless. I’m not changing anything (or leaving anything!), but I get so much from it because I put so much into it. When I do days like this with a friend and we put that effort in together (getting up ungodly early, chugging cold brew on the drive up, pushing each other to keep pace all day) we get so much out of it together. I did this hike with a friend I’d known for over three years, and yet, at the end of the day I thought, man, I feel so much closer to this person.

The next day, I went to yoga with a friend, Summer. It was one of those lovely restorative classes where you hold a pose for 5 minutes and just stretch. My mind wandered all over the place throughout the hour long class, but halfway through, it landed back on the night of that second date. For a brief moment, I felt like I was placed back into my 27 year old body and brain, looking at Longs and thinking “Holy shit. I can’t believe people hike that.”

My mind naturally wandered to revisiting the details of the day before. The conversations I had. The feeling of sore glutes and quads towards the end of the day. The morning sun hitting my skin after 3 hours of hiking. Feeling the cold trying to bite through my jacket as I got above tree-line. The elevation tightening my lungs just enough that I could feel it. Looking down at a teeny tiny foothold and trusting my climbing shoes, despite the rational part of my brain telling me to do otherwise. Taking off my socks in 26°F weather and putting on my climbing shoes even when my feet were begging me not to. The freezing cold rock completely numbing my fingers. The sweet, sweet taste of dried mango after hiking 11 miles. Not being able to see my climbing partner, but still being able to hear the whoosh of him blowing hot air onto his hands and knowing we were in the pain cave together. Embracing fear in an entirely new context.

I realized that somewhere along the process of walking 15 miles that day, I walked into a version of myself I’d been imagining for years and years and years.

A fun little commission for a wedding gift. I refuse to draw faces, so the blurred skin tones felt like a great compromise. My first attempt at a bouquet too and I had a blast with the details.

⛷️ Is there anything better than one of your favorite people going on one of your favorite podcasts? Nope. Madison Rose was on the Out of Collective Podcast this week and I loved every single word of it. Madison gets introduced as a “rippin’ skier and a rippin’ human” and I think my new goal in life is to be described as such.

⚽ I almost never talk about my first love on here: soccer. I officially hung up my cleats last season, but my obsession with the sport is for life, so I was unbelievably happy to see that San Diego Wave is retiring Alex Morgan’s jersey. As they should, IMO.

PS: Denver Summit FC is officially drafting players and the iron is hot, hot, hot.

🧗 Emily Harrington (1/2 of the most bad ass couple on the planet) is coming out with a new film, Girl Climber, and doing the obligatory press tour to go with it. I loved listening to her and Alex Honnold absolutely nerd out on this episode of Climbing Gold.

🔒 Anyone else watch the Oura x Palantir drama unfold a few weeks ago? Yeesh. The internet really did its thing with this one. File it under: Why I’m a Boomer Who Hates TikTok.

📔 I’ve always been a believer that your life can change, but not as quickly as the stories you tell yourself about it. This Substack article, we become the stories others tell about us, hit the nail on the head in so many different ways.

🏔️ I’ve had this in my repository for a while, so the news is a little stale, but Winter Park is joining the big leagues. The mountain approved a $2B master plan that includes a much-awaited town-to-resort gondola. The expansion will bump Winter Park into third place for most skiable terrain in Colorado, just behind Vail and Steamboat.

I’ve definitely used this quote before, but it feels more resonant than ever this week:

“Everyone thinks the mountains are super dangerous, and they are, of course, but in reality, the mountains are incredibly forgiving.” - Greg Hill

- McCall 🌻

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