Longs Peak attempt.

After our successful trip to Chasm Lake Morgan and I got pretty psyched about doing some more steep snow climbs. So this Monday (12th of March 2007) Morgan and I attempted to summit Longs Peak. In current near-winter conditions it was a very ambitious goal, but we decided to give it a shot. Our first priority was getting some steep snow climbing, so the route was chosen accordingly. We decided to start very early, get to the Chasm Lake, climb Lamb's Slide, get to the Loft, then turn around Longs Peak and get to the summit via Clark's Arrow route. Here is map showing the Chasm Lake Cirque with some of the names and the route we did:

We left Fort Collins at 1-10am and got to the Longs Peak trailhead around 2-30am. After gearing up we started hiking at 3-10am. The night was clear and warm, with no wind. The trail was glazed with ice and pretty slick, so after about 5 or 10 minutes of hiking we put on crampons and went on. We had a long way to go to Chasm Lake, and our most important objective lied further.

It's an eerie feeling, hiking in the middle of the night in the winter forest, with an LED headlamp as a main source of light. With LED's very white and not very powerful illumination, you have a spot of ghostly white trail in front of you surrounded with a bunch of black shadows. It is a pretty exquisite feeling (especially after having 1.5 hours of sleep ;-).

After we got above timberline, the wind picked up and it got pretty chilly. As we made our way up to the Chasm Junction, we were either postholing through the wind drifts or tripping over exposed rocks. It was still pitch black, with no indication of the sunrise, wind was blowing continuously, and I was slowly cooling down. I took off my fleece layer when we started hiking, so I had only a T-shirt and a windbreaker, which definitely wasn't enough. My hands were getting really cold without liner gloves, but there was no good place to stop and put these things on and we weren't cold enough to do it in the wind. Finally, after ~2 hours of hiking we got past the windy Chasm Junction (it's almost always windy there since it's on the ridge) and hid from the wind over a tall boulder on the shoulder of Mount Lady Washington.

There we put some additional clothes and had some food with a few sips of hot green jasmine tea. Despite the fact that thermos is heavy and caffeine is diuretic (not the best thing in the mountains, where the danger of dehydration is ever-present), it's one of the absolutely must-have items for me. Nothing lifts the spirit and shakes you up quite like it ;-). This time too, after our tea-break things were looking much better, and it wasn't that cold anymore. The east horizon was turning into a red band - it was time to move along. We put crampons on (we took them off negotiating a rocky path to the Chasm Junction), took out ice axes and went ahead.

Watching the sunrise in a place like that is amazing. The colors were quickly changing from deep-red to orange and then to gold:We were crossing snow slopes on our way to Chasm Lake, and the place could not be better for watching the whole succession of colors. It was well worth getting up in the midnight:

As you can probably tell, the sky on these last two photos is very deep-blue. This time instead of having a UV filter, I put a circular polarizer on my camera. I think it paid off :-).

When we got to the Chasm Lake the sun was pretty high up, illuminating the Diamond with golden light. Simply amazing, a Golden Diamond:To be continued...