Sleepless with Longs Peak
In mid-September after visiting friends and running errands in Denver and Fort Collins, Claudia and I headed to Rocky Mountain National Park, where I had reserved some last minute wilderness camping permits for three nights. The main goal was to revisit Longs Peak, one of Colorado's most impressive mountains, which I haven't visited or photographed since nearly 20 years ago!
Sunrise light illuminates Ypsilon Mountain (13,445 ft) above Spectacle Lakes in the Mummy Range of Rocky Mountain National Park.
But before we went to Longs Peak, we first spent a night in the Mummy Range below Ypsilon Mountain. The wind was ripping during our stay and we had a fitful sleep that night as the gusts would roar through the forest and the shadows of wildly swaying trees shone on our tent in the moonlight.
Despite our lack of sleep, we woke up early in the morning and hiked in the dark up to Spectacle Lakes for sunrise. Though I was following a marked trail on my map, the route ended up being more of a boot-trail followed by a tricky scrambling climb to get up there. Fortunately I made it just in time to catch the sunrise light! The cirque is impressive and imposing, but the relentless chilly winds had me retreating soon after sunrise without being able to sit around and enjoy the views.
Sunrise over Rocky Mountain National Park.
Once back at camp, we packed our gear, hiked back down to our car at the trailhead, drove over to the Longs Peak trailhead, repacked our backpacks with more food and clothes, and headed right back out on our next backpack trip up to the Boulderfield below Longs Peak.
Autumn colors along the trail to Longs Peaks.
The autumn colors were lovely in the backlit alpine heather along the Longs Peak trail. The trail itself is quite a monument to fourteener trail work - it's often a continuous "flagstoned" path of large flat boulders! The amount of work it must have taken to build is mind boggling. I suppose it was necessary to build such a robust and permanent trail in order to avoid damage to the tundra landscape from the estimated 10-15,000 hikers that pass by here each year (source).
The 3,400 vertical foot ascent from the trailhead to the Boulderfield campsite is more tiring than the number suggests, since the trail stretches a huge amount of additional distance around meandering switchbacks rather than a steeper direct route. While the excessively low-angled trail can be a bit frustrating on the way up, my knees appreciated it on the way down!
A pika on a boulder with the Mummy Range in the background.
After our previous sleepless night in the Mummy Range followed by such a long day of hiking, we were quite exhausted by the time we made it up to our campsite in the Boulderfield at 12,800 ft elevation. We arrived with just enough spare time to set up the tent and filter water before sunset, then despite my weariness and hunger I had to set off again for my main photo objective of the trip: lunar alpenglow on Longs Peak!
I've photographed dawn and sunrise on Longs Peak from high up on neighboring Mount Lady Washington twice before, way back in 2005... 19 years ago! (You can see one of those large format 4x5 film photos here). Since then I've seen several panoramic photos from the top of Mount Lady Washington (such as this wonderful photo from RMNP maestro Erik Stensland) and naturally I've been intrigued about capturing a similar panoramic perspective, which wasn't really a consideration or possibility back in my large format film days. But I'm not a big fan of the mindless exercise of just trying to duplicate other photographers' shots, so I thought something a little different would be fun - in this case my idea was to shoot a moonrise instead of sunrise! Looking at the astro maps before this trip, I could see that the timing and alignment of moonrise would be perfect for Longs Peak on this night, and I planned this whole trip accordingly. So I was pretty thrilled that the weather was clear and I'm happy with how it turned out!
Moonrise light illuminates the massive east face of Longs Peak (14,259 ft / 4346 m) after dusk on a September evening in Rocky Mountain National Park. The city lights of Denver and its surrounding cities are visible to the left.
The camera's sensitive sensor and long exposures reveal lunar alpenglow colors on the peak that were much dimmer to the naked eye in person. So while this isn't a truly "natural" rendition of the scene as witnessed, I still think it's a compelling photo!
Needless to say, after hiking from pre-dawn through post-dusk I was pretty beat. My exhaustion reminded me of another sleepless adventure on my first visit to Longs Peak back in May of 2005. I had hiked up Mount Lady Washington to shoot sunrise from there, then I proceeded through the Keyhole route up to the summit of Longs, with crampons and ice axe to handle the lingering snowpack. I was the only person on the mountain that day, and by the time I got to the summit I was so tired that I laid down on a big flat boulder and instantly fell sound asleep! I woke up after I don't know how long, maybe an hour, and I was pretty freaked out since it's kind of dangerous to fall asleep on a mountain summit when I could have woken up too late during an afternoon thunderstorm! To make matters worse, my high alpine nap hadn't really refreshed me, but rather I was stuck in a sort of hazy stupor, unable to snap out of my sleepiness. Finally in a desperate attempt to wake myself up, I smoked a bit of weed. Like a mental slap in the face, that snapped me out of my stupor! I was then able to descend safely with an awake mind. So... that was the day that weed saved my life. 🤣 (For the record, I'm not recommending my past alpine "safety" strategies... I just think it's a funny story!).
Camping in the Boulderfield below Longs Peak. The Boulderfield campsites are basically just circles of flat(ish) space cleared from the boulders surrounded by rock wall windbreaks. It's a barren but pretty unique place to camp.
My lunar alpenglow shoot concluded one very long day: a sunrise mission, hiking down from the mountains, hiking back up into the mountains, and then a nighttime moonrise mission. But since I was all the way up here, I figured I might as well wake up early for another sunrise mission the next morning too! Instead of repeating the Mount Lady Washington perspective, I spontaneously decided to check out Chasm View for sunrise. And what a surprise awesome sunrise it was!
A breathtaking sunrise from Chasm View as the first warm rays of sunlight illuminate The Diamond, the sheer granite east face of Longs Peak (14,259 ft / 4346 m). This massive face is one of the largest alpine rock walls in Colorado and a world famous climb first ascended by Dave Rearick and Bob Kamps in 1960.
It is difficult to convey the sheer scale of this scene, which is a panorama of stitched vertical photos from a very wide angle 14mm lens. Even with such a wide lens shot in vertical orientation, I still could not fit the entire base of the wall in the frame!
Also worth mentioning is how terrifying it was to photograph this scene at the edge of a sheer abyss. In fact the wall directly below me appeared to be tilted past vertical, and glancing over the edge was nearly heart-stopping even though I don't have an acute fear of heights. I placed my tripod right on the edge with one leg extended out towards me where I could hold it from a distance, laid down back from the edge, and reached out as far as I could with my arms to control the camera. The adrenaline of being at this precipitous spot combined with the elation of witnessing a spectacular sunrise here made for quite an exhilarating morning shoot!
I was super stoked with the sunrise from Chasm View, but once I got back to our tent I had to crash out for another much-needed hour or two of sleep. We finally woke up and had our coffee after the rush hour of 14er hikers had already mostly passed by. Though we had planned on hiking up Longs Peak (which Claudia hasn't hiked up before), we were both just too damn tired (or lazy) to go for it. Oh well, we're not big peakbaggers anyways so no big loss.
We took our time packing up then headed back down at a casual pace, with a detour to check out Chasm Lake.
Looking up at the massive east face of Longs Peak from Chasm Lake.
Chasm Lake, at the base of the massive rocky cirque formed by the east face of Longs Peak, must be one of the most spectacular scenes in all of Colorado. Just stunning. The sheer scale of the peak looming overhead feels almost Patagonian. Longs was formed from 1.4 billion-year-old granite, and I think that there's something about granite peaks that makes them feel especially powerful. Maybe the sheer mass exerts its own gravitational pull. Or maybe it's just the simple sensation of being so close so something so BIG.
In any case, after lounging around by the lake for an hour or so, we continued our journey back downhill to the Goblin Forest campsite where we spent one final night before returning to our car and driving back home to southwest Colorado. Though I longed 😉 to wake up early again and hike back up to Chasm Lake for sunrise, I knew it wasn't happening. I needed sleep... badly. Luckily we had a calm windless night for a change and slept soundly for 11 hours straight!
