Longs Peak

Longs Peak is a mountain in the northern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains of North America. The 14,256-foot (4345.22 m) fourteener is located in the Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness, 9.6 miles (15.5 km) southwest by south (bearing 209°) of the Town of Estes Park, Colorado, United States. Longs Peak is the northernmost fourteener in the Rocky Mountains and the highest point in Boulder County and Rocky Mountain National Park. The mountain was named in honor of explorer Stephen Harriman Long and is featured on the Colorado state quarter.

Longs Peak can be seen behind Mt. Meeker from Longmont, Colorado and more directly from Loveland, Colorado, as well as from most of the northern Front Range Urban Corridor. It is one of the most prominent mountains in Colorado, rising 9,000 feet (2,700 m) above the western edge of the Great Plains.

The peak is named for Major Stephen Harriman Long, who is said to have been the first to spot the Front Range on June 30, 1820, during an expedition on behalf of the U.S. government.

Together with nearby Mount Meeker, with an elevation of 13,911 feet, the two mountains are sometimes referred to as the Twin Peaks (not to be confused with a nearby lower mountain called Twin Sisters).

As the only fourteener in Rocky Mountain National Park, the peak has long been of interest to climbers. The easiest route is not "technical" during the summer season. It was probably first used by pre-Columbian indigenous people collecting eagle feathers.

The first recorded ascent was on August 23, 1868 by the surveying party of John Wesley Powell via the south side. Addie Alexander was the first woman to summit Longs Peak in 1871. Isabella L Bird also recounts an ascent in the 1870s in one of her letters (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains)

The East Face of the mountain is 1,675 feet, steep, and surmounted by a 1,000 feet steep sheer cliff known as "The Diamond" (so-named because of its shape, approximately that of a cut diamond seen from the side and inverted). Another famous profile belongs to Longs Peak: to the southeast of the summit is a series of rises which, when viewed from the northeast, resembles a beaver. Lumena Wortman Buhl was the first woman to summit the east face of the mountain.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Blaurock)

In 1954 the first proposal made to the National Park Service to climb The Diamond was met with an official closure, a stance not changed until 1960. The Diamond was first ascended by Dave Rearick and Bob Kamps that year, by a route that would come to be known simply as D1. This route would later be listed in Allen Steck and Steve Roper's influential book Fifty Classic Climbs of North America. The easiest route on the face is the Casual Route (5.10a), first climbed in 1977. It has since become the most popular route up the wall.