From Mount Quandary to Longs Peak: A Change of Plans
Slight change of plans.
I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to be creating an Instagram story that detailed Mount Quandary’s “escape hatch.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t a possibility due to poor weather and a lack of information that could be curated for the post.
So, I improvised.
For my initial story about the Colorado student who fell off of Mount Harvard and survived (if you haven’t read that yet, you should do so now), I did a good amount of research about Longs Peak. It’s one of the of the most alluring 14ers in the state, but it’s also one of the deadliest. I went to the Longs Peak trailhead yesterday and made my Instagram story about the deadly allure of this particular mountain, and I offer some tips to those who think they can climb it alone.
Here are some stats. The peak has claimed over 60 lives in total — an average of one person dies on this peak every single year, although there are outlier years with higher numbers of fatalities. Below is list of all of the recorded fatalities on Longs Peak through 2014. The list was curated by The Coloradoan.
Located in Rocky Mountain National Park, Longs Peak is only a two-hour drive from Denver, making it a hot destination for touristy-hikers. There are over 100 routes that can be taken to the summit, although the most popular route is arguably “The Keyhole” route because it doesn’t require that much technical climbing — it’s mostly scrambling.
The hike is about a 14-mile round trip and can take upwards of 15 hours for those who aren’t acclimated to the elevation. Hikers gain over 5,000 feet of elevation during the hike and along the way have to come face-to-face with exposed terrain with 1,000-foot falls should they make one little mistake. The peak towers over Rocky Mountain National Park at a staggering 14,259 feet. It’s the 15-tallest 14er out of Colorado’s more than 50 14,000-foot mountains.
In the summer, Longs Peak is a hotbed for hikers of all skill-sets. The narrow and exposed terrain create bottlenecks of hikers, making the risk of a fall all the more likely.
In 2014, Outdoor Magazine listed Longs Peak as one of the most dangerous hikes in the world thanks to the peak’s narrow ledges and sleep cliffs. The potential for a fatal mistake is extremely high at Longs Peak, and if you decide to hike it alone, make sure you have experience climbing at altitude and know how to read the mountain. If your gut tells you to turn around, DO IT. The mountain will always be there, and you can come back and try to stand on top of it again. Too many fatal mistakes on Longs Peak happened when people went against their intuition and kept pushing up the mountain, in most cases over icy and snow-covered ledges, where they would eventually end up slipping and falling to their death.
It’s estimated that about 15,000 people try to summit Longs Peak every single year, but only about half of them actually make it to the top, according to Rocky Mountain National Park statistics. That’s unnerving and also comforting at the same time. It’s unnerving thinking about the sheer number of people who think they have what it takes to climb this mountain, only to realize they don’t. They clog up the narrow Keyhole route like an artery and put everyone else on the mountain in danger by doing so. However, it’s comforting to think that most people who realize they don’t have what it takes to make it to the summit turn around before they make a fatal mistake. The death rate on this mountain would be remarkably higher if the majority of hikers didn’t turn around when their gut told them to.
