Longs Peak: The Cable, Keyhole Lollypop

It's 5 a.m in Boulder and we are in the Marriott. My standard of living always goes up when Matt is with me. We're headed up to the trailhead of Longs Peak. It's going to be an interesting morning. We've called an Uber to take us on the hour-long drive to the parking lot where we'll be stashing our bags. So treasure hunt alert if you happen to be in Boulder or near Boulder and you stumble upon our bags, good for you. The contents are yours. Early morning though feeling rough like someone dumped shards of glass in my eyes. Today I'm with Matt and Devin and together hopefully we'll be making it to the top of Longs Peak without being struck by lightning or getting caught behind any kind of conga line to the summit. We're gonna be taking an Uber up to the trailhead. Hopefully Matt can convince him to stop at McDonald's and then head up to the Longs Peak trailhead. I'll get the sausage egg McMuffin meal. I don't know what number that is. Another number two? Yeah with a Dasani water. Yeah thank you. Thank you. All right have a safe drive back. We're at the parking lot and for a weekday it is pretty jam-packed with cars. We're starting at about 40 degrees temperature wise but we're gonna head up this trail and it should be around eight miles to the summit. We've stashed our bags down off of this hill so if you looking to get yourself some sweet gear get here quick. It's about 6 30 in the morning and it is freezing right here. It's 40 degrees but here we are Longs Peak. We're gonna run it. It's gonna be pretty and anything could happen. Here we go. A couple miles in and Longs Peak is the northernmost 14er in Colorado. It's also the one of the most popular. In some of the descriptions they said you could find a hundred people on the summit some weekends in the summer and occasionally there's conga lines basically at the last little bit. We're hoping by hitting it on a Thursday we'll bypass some of that traffic. Right now we're doing the keyhole route which like I said is the most popular route. We'd like to try something different so we just talked to some guys with really colorful socks and they suggested something called the cable route. We might hit that up once we get up higher. So we lost a little bit of time trying to get directions. We just want to know what our options are for climbing this but gone 3.6 miles 2100 feet of vert and uh great trail. More exciting. We decided to just go up a random route and I think that we're gonna get cliffed up so that's what you get for trying to be creative. He's trying to make things way more exciting. All right we've reached the climbing section and contrary to what I said earlier I think it's climbable. I had little faith about a thousand feet ago but now it's looking great. Still look doable? This is where it kind of gets dicey you know. That was freaky. This thing is covered in ice. Like this sheer clear ice. Dude this thing is it's steep. We just did the first section of the cable route which was kind of scary especially since it had ice on it but we managed to make it up it. All of us alive. I didn't like it though. Didn't like it at all. I'm not a fan of ice. We're at the top of Longs 14,200 and change even though the ice tried its best to stop us. Lovely peak. The wind is definitely brutal. There was a moment back there when the wind blew so hard and was so loud Matt and Dev thought that our rock was collapsing somewhere and now we're going to eat some food drink some water and near the keyhole. Pretty cool. Let's sleep in here. Yeah this is nice. This is quality mountain shelter right here. You can lock the door with your axe. Great view. Watch the kids play out We ended with about 5,000 feet of climbing and 15 miles distance. Cool route. Cool mountain. You may have noticed at the end there we picked up a stranger and his name is Taylor and we're actually hitching a ride from him back to Boulder so very glad we met him. That's Longs peak. 15 miles, 5,000 feet of climbing or more. We did the cable keyhole lollipop and I'm glad we finished what we did because it's getting hot. The coolest part was definitely going up. Just that scramble. It's because your mind is fully focused so that's my favorite part. Coming up that keyhole is pretty fun like a pretty fun exercise but I would say that last three miles always is just like yeah. We've grabbed the bags from our stash and now Taylor's going to give us a ride home and maybe we'll pick him up.