Longs Peak and Its First Ascent
Near Estes Park, Colorado
Look southwest and you will see it, a great flat topped summit standing above every other peak on the skyline. That is Longs Peak, the highest mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park and the northernmost of Colorado's fourteen thousand foot peaks, rising to roughly fourteen thousand two hundred fifty nine feet. Sources differ by a few feet on the exact figure, but by any measure it is a giant.
The mountain was named for the explorer Stephen Harriman Long, whose expedition spotted it in eighteen twenty. The first recorded ascent came decades later. On the twenty third of August, eighteen sixty eight, a party led by the one armed explorer John Wesley Powell, together with the newspaper editor William Byers and several others, climbed the south side of the mountain and stood on the summit before ten in the morning.
Byers, ever the newsman, published an account of the climb in the Rocky Mountain News just days afterward. Today thousands of hikers attempt Longs Peak every summer, most by the famous Keyhole Route, though it remains a serious and sometimes deadly climb. For most visitors, though, it is enough to simply watch its flat crown catch the first and last light of each day over Estes Park.
