Tag Archives: long’s peak

Long Cut on Long’s Peak

As a long overdue follow-on to last year’s post Long Day on Long’s Peak (anyone else enjoy that play on words?), I present Long’s Peak: Keyhole Route. I’m continuing with a couple themes that I’ve latched onto recently.

Google Earth flyovers – I don’t have a helicopter or a RED Digital Cinema camera so you get this instead. I think it’s cool looking and it adds some context…
Some semblance or story arc. Alright maybe that’s a stretch, but the idea here (seen also in Castle Peak and mostly not seen in any of my skiing stuff) is that a solidly good, 1water1coffee1beer sort of day has a beginning, middle and end during which we travel through a variety of moods, conditions, and settings; almost like a miniature epic…
Playlist format – saves me from feeling quite as bad when I have to cut 98% of the footage but allows for at least some of it to be narrowly focused and less indulgent than I often tend to be because I can include a few extras that would otherwise be gratuitous in an amateur short video.

Alright enough blabbing! Full-screen, volume up, and draw the blinds a bit – best viewed with no glare!

Flash! Thunder!

Similarly spectacular, but an order of magnitude more perilous, hike number two is in the books for Brian and Kelly in Colorado: Season 2. Objective hazards don’t really eat at me all that much. A long climb in no-fall terrain, for example is cut and dry: be careful and don’t fall. Or storm skiing in the backcountry: stay off the steep slopes or anything attached to a steep slope. Risk mitigated. It’s the stuff that you really have no control over – no effective means of mitigation – that freaks me out.

Like lightning.

What to do about lightning… Run for cover I guess? A dubious proposition at best, if above treeline. Or in an an expansive pasture which extends for miles in all directions. I suppose the best you can do is make haste downhill until you find yourself surrounded by old growth where the chance of being directly struck or of being fragged by a Lodgepole Pine whose impedance was a bit too high to transmit 100 million Volts is reasonably remote is really your only recourse.

Yikes!

We checked the living daylights out of the forecast, saw that there was a chance of showers and thunder around 2PM and settled on a turnaround time of noon. We hit the trail at quarter to 9AM, summitted at or before 11AM, took stock of the brooding, dark clouds, and hightailed it out of the alpine. As soon as we hit treeline we were greeted by an unmistakable blue-ish flash and a near-contemporaneous crack. We hit the deck, no doubt far too late to make any difference to mother nature, cinched up our pack suspensions and hauled ass downhill as fast as wet snow and micro-spikes will allow. Our new friend Rolling Thunder followed us downhill for a good mile or so before we began to feel comfortable with the level of risk.

To make a long story short, we were not struck. We did, however, capture some cool pictures of the ominous skies and swirling clouds between running for our lives and wondering whether or not NOAA is to be trusted in the future…

Long Day on Long’s Peak

With Fall rapidly approaching, I felt that 14er season, especially for novices like me, would be quickly coming to a close. Emboldened by my recent success on Capital Peak, I decided to go after Long’s Peak. When the leaves are down, I can just about see it out my office window. A quick drive around the block reveals the towering peak, in all of it’s glory. It’s been taunting me since we moved into the house last November. I could no longer just ignore it. So, I checked the weather about a thousand times, squared away my affairs with work for the week, packed a huge heap of clothing, food, and water, and set my alarm for 2:45 AM. Two hours and 15 minutes later (I really need to work on my alpine starts) I was on the trail and ready to rock.

Waking up at 2:45 AM: not usually worth it; this time: totally worth it! More to come… #dawnpatrol #alpinestart #longspeak #rmnp

A video posted by Brian Sweeney (@briangsweeney) on Sep 18, 2016 at 9:23am PDT

I’ve really been in the mood for experimentation lately, so I started by running my GoPro for a short section of the pre-dawn approach (seen above). I used my Hero 3 Black with ProTune turned on, and attempted to brighten things up using Premier Pro. It didn’t come out the best, but it’s a starting point. I’ll have to read up, or try again.

At the suggestion of my comrade Andrew, I started shooting stills using the raw format rather than jpeg. From what I gather, the image quality is higher, there is no compression and no color manipulation. The same is more or less true when using ProTune on the GoPro. All of this lends to a better quality original stock, and confers advantages in post-processing. With all of this in mind, I quickly obtained a trial license of Lightroom and commenced fiddling. Results are seen below. Hopefully this doesn’t make me too big of a cheater: I tried to keep my manipulations on the tasteful side, though there is some decided experimentation going on here. What can I say? I enjoy fiddling with computers…

Stay tuned for a follow up post with more detail on the hike itself and possibly some sort of GoPro edit featuring the harrowing final approach to the summit!

Chasm Lake

For those that keep track of such things, we’ve now started to proceed roughly in reverse chronological order. I’ve developed a seriously massive backlog of material and have finally endeavored to sift out the boring stuff and post the rest.

Chasm Lake is a spectacular alpine lake nestled just beneath the Diamond on the east face of Long’s Peak. This trip was another one of our 14er warm up hikes, although it’s well worth doing apart from the exercise. Yet again, you quickly climb above treeline and are treated to spectacular views, primarily to the west where Long’s Peak looms above.

Once again we hit the trail around six or seven. We weren’t always this diligent with regards to our alpine starts; more on that in subsequent episodes… There are really no downsides to starting so early, apart from the obvious. On the other hand, you spend a substantial portion of the hike climbing during the ‘golden hour’, with beautiful long shadows streaking westward; the slopes ahead bathed in the warm glow of the morning sun. As an added perk it’s usually pretty cool at this time of day – perfect for climbing!

The Diamond looms in the distance.

Wildflowers with Columbine Falls to the left.

Peacock Pool!

Julie and Kelly

Chasm Lake with an Arc’teryx photo shoot ongoing in the background…

Like Quandary, Long’s is crowded on nice days. However, if your goal is Chasm Lake, there is plenty of room to spread out and relax in relative quiet. Once there, if our experience is at all representative you’ll have the opportunity to watch climbers working on multi-pitch routes on the huge walls that surround the lake.