The Diamond

The Diamond as seen from Chasm Lake (photo: Tom Dunwiddie)

Saturday, August 27th, 2005:

 

Though I had quietly deliberated all day whether I was in over my head, watching my rappel device hurtling toward Mills Glacier from 13,100 feet ended the debate.  Fortunately we were on the way down, having just completed our fifth—of a total of nine—double-rope rappels from the top of the Diamond to Mills Glacier, the point from which one can safely unrope and walk off the mountain.  Had I committed this blunder during the climb, or even higher on the rappels, the consequences might have been far more serious.  But from the relatively benign slopes that culminate at the Broadway Ledge, this tired mistake would do little to dampen my soaring spirit.

 

I awoke at eight-thirty, only slightly hung over.  I groped for my cell phone and dialed Wally's number.  "Wally", my voice cracked, "Are you ready?"  We agreed to meet at the I-25 and 120th street Park & Ride in one hour.  Arriving late, I picked up Wally and his gear and together we headed north towards Estes Park.  Saturday we would climb a couple of routes on the Twin Owls of Lumpy Ridge, wolf down a fast food dinner as if it were our last, and each hump 45lbs. of gear four miles and 2,600 vertical feet to a bivy at Chasm Lake.  Then, early Sunday morning, we would attempt to climb the formidable Diamond.

 

In December, at the Tech Section holiday party, I drunkenly asked Wally to take me up the Diamond, the 1,000-foot vertical east face of Longs Peak.  Wally drunkenly agreed, adding with bravado that we would "smoke" it.  Wally (a.k.a. WallMan) is a seasoned mountaineer and big wall climber, with ascents of El Capitan's The Nose, Zion's Touchstone Wall, a summit of Denali, and even a brazen attempt on Broad Peak—the world's twelfth highest mountain—to his credit.

 

The Twin Owls joined forces to kick my ass.  Two whippers on Conan’s Gonads, followed by a third on the Wolf's Tooth, put the kibosh on any big crack illusions I had that day.  This was not the confidence builder I was looking for less than 24 hours before the Diamond.  Instead I took it easy, following Wally up the dreadful off-widths.

 

Long after the bacchanalian haze of the holiday party receded Wally's promise still stood, and it became apparent with summer's rapid approach that I would in fact attempt to climb, in only my third season of climbing, what Alpinist magazine has called a crucible of alpine, big-wall climbing in the lower 48.  In March we fixed a date—Sunday, August 14th, 2005.  From there forward my trajectory arced toward that Sunday with orbital precision.

 

On the descent from the Twin Owls it occurred to us that we had forgotten to pick up our bivy permit.  Without it we would in all likelihood get drunk in Estes, stay up way too late, and hike all the tortuous way to the Diamond in the wee hours of Sunday morning.  It was almost five o’clock and, while Wally was secretly hoping for the drunken Estes outcome, I was kicking it into high gear to make the ranger station before closing time.  Thankfully we made it.  As the ranger wrote out the permit I inquired about tomorrow’s weather.  “It’s going to be perfect,” he assured us, the forecast calling for only a ten percent chance of afternoon showers (about as good as it gets in the Park).  Next stop Subway, for a foot-long, four-day-old Tuna on wheat and, finally, the Longs Peak trailhead, where we would sort gear and saddle up for the steep hike to Chasm Lake.  By the time we arrived at our bivy, at around nine-thirty, it was well after dark.

 

August 11th, 2005—three days before our scheduled attempt—dawned sunny and warm, just as had the previous forty, or so, consecutive days during which afternoon temperatures frequently exceeded 100 degrees and nary a cloud appeared in the afternoon sky.  Any of these precious days would have been ideal for a Diamond climb but we squandered every one.  The forecast for our Diamond weekend was ominous, however, and Wally and I prudently agreed to postpone the climb until August 28th.  On August 12^th the annual monsoon arrived, soaking the Front Range with torrential rains the entire weekend.  I awoke on Saturday morning, sleeping until well after ten o’clock, utterly deflated.  That day I lamented my misfortune by consuming vast quantities of chocolate cake and beer.

 

By ten-thirty we were snug in our bags and beckoning sleep, in spite of the annoying stream trickling just a few feet beneath the rocks on which we lay.  Between the time I crawled into my bag and finally fell asleep, at around midnight, a mental switch got thrown.  After all the hard work, anticipation, disappointment and attendant angst that had dominated my existence the last six months, the object of my obsession had finally arrived or, rather, I had arrived at it.  I could sense the Diamond’s enormous mass hovering over my tent walls.  The time had finally come to dispense with the Elephant and, if tomorrow came and went without having conquered the Diamond, it sure as hell wouldn’t be from lack of effort.  These thoughts brought relief, and a sense of calm that allowed me to sleep.

 

Chasm View Wall (foreground) and the Boulder Field from the Yellow Wall bivy ledge, taken from 1,500 feet above the base of Longs Peak’s vertical east face

 

Sunday, August 28^th, 2005:

Four-thirty, the time at which Wally had set his cell phone alarm, came and went silently as we cluelessly slumbered.  Fortunately, the other party in our bivy cave had set their alarm for five o’clock.  Alas, Wally’s cell phone had run out of juice during the night.  I shot out of my bag, slammed a liter of water and two Luna bars, gathered my gear, and iodized another liter of water for the climb.  It was still dark, and a horizontal band of red widened above the eastern horizon.

 

At five-thirty we began the day’s arduous journey, first up the huge boulders above Chasm Lake, then the steep snow of Mills Glacier, then the North Chimney and, finally, the Casual Route, the base of which still lay 1,000 vertical feet above us.  By the time we arrived at the tongue of snow separating the giant boulders from the North Chimney the gathering light made it possible to count perhaps a dozen other trail-weary souls making their own bids on the Diamond that day.  Were they all gunning for the Casual Route?  If so we would be forced to scuttle the climb before we even started, for what seemed an intolerably absurd reason.

 

We mostly simul-climbed the 700-foot North Chimney—setting a fixed belay here and there to collect gear or protect a tricky section—and arrived at the Broadway Ledge at around eight-thirty.  The sun had already risen and begun warming the immense, 18-acre vertical granite monster that towered above us.  So big was the Diamond from this vantage point that, when looking up at it, it filled my entire field of vision.  Astonishingly, there were only two parties ahead of us on the Casual Route.  Perhaps the others figured the Casual would be too busy and so, wisely, picked other routes to climb that day.  Within a half-hour, at about nine, I was leading the first pitch.  I stopped just below our predecessor party’s second at the first belay, and clipped in to the nest of slings supported by two pitons in parallel cracks above.

 

Wally and I traded pitches all morning, staying hot on the heels of the party above us.  The pitches were long and the climbing aesthetic and sustained.  From time to time during our ascent I looked off to the North, where I had seen cumulus clouds forming since early in the morning.  Oddly, these had been growing and moving from east to west.  This pattern concerned me because, normally, clouds of this type don’t form until much later in the day, and then typically move in a north-easterly direction—had the weather forecasters screwed us yet again?  By the time we arrived at the Yellow Wall bivy ledge, two pitches from the top of the route, it was one-thirty, and there was a narrow band of rain spanning the entire length of the Estes Park valley.  Behind this squall appeared blue sky, but my view of it became obscured by the curtain of rain which grew more opaque the closer it got.  By now, too, the sun had long ago left the face, taking with it the relatively warm temperatures we had enjoyed during the morning hours.  It was perhaps now 40 degrees, and getting steadily colder as the clouds moved in.

 

As Wally arrived at the ledge he began sizing up a fixed anchor of slings for a possible rappel for he, too, had been watching the weather and had retreat on his mind.  I offered Wally a prediction:  any precipitation we encountered would be short-lived, giving way to the blue sky I had seen earlier.  Wally forced a smile, behind which surely lay unpleasant recollections, and donned his rain gear.  I followed suit.  Just as Wally began shimmying up P7, the crux pitch of the Casual Route, it began to snow.

 

Wally forcing a smile after agreeing to lead the crux pitch in spite of approaching squall

 

The rain band had not yet reached us but was bearing down rapidly.  Almost miraculously, just as it reached the northern edge of the Diamond, the squall stopped and turned due east.  “Thank God”, I whispered to myself.  Elated, I yelled up to Wally, “It’s going to miss us!”  Not once during my weather vigil had I bothered to check what was going on to the south or east of us, as from that direction the clouds should have been moving away from us.  Just to make sure, though, I glanced over my left shoulder to look in that direction.  What I saw there gave me shivers.  A dark gray pillar of cloud stretched from Chasm Lake 2,000 feet below, completely obscuring its far end, to as high as the eye could see—what’s more, it was closing rapidly.  Characteristic of Longs, the peak was generating its own bizarre weather pattern, positioning the aforementioned squall in for an end-around.  Within moments the massive cloud enveloped us and it was snowing again.  Mercifully, for now, there was very little wind and the flakes floated benignly past.

 

By the time Wally reached the Table Ledge belay at the terminus of the route, the skies above us had cleared, yielding to a brilliant azure blue sky.  As I looked straight up I became hypnotized by what appeared to be millions of birds flying high above the summit of Longs Peak.  I had never seen such a massive concentration of birds before.  For a moment I thought I might be hallucinating, perhaps owing to the scarcity of oxygen at 14,000 feet.  Finally I realized that what I was seeing was millions of snowflakes that had been carried by the wind from some far off cloud and deposited high above us, left to drift aimlessly to Earth.

 

Me chillin’ on the Yellow Wall bivy ledge

 

The crux pitch of the Casual Route worked me hard.  The ambient temperature was perhaps 30 degrees when I stepped off the Yellow Wall bivy ledge into the chimney (alcove, really) marking the start of the seventh pitch.  Running down either corner of this alcove was frigid water from runoff, making the few jams there instantly numbing to fingertips placed within.  Much of the dihedral walls were wet, as well, making the footwork insecure.  I resigned early into the pitch that I would not free the Casual Route this day.  I pulled on gear, and even took a hang, on my way up the first of P7’s formidable problems.  Above the alcove came a short rest stance, followed by the 5.8 squeeze chimney I had read so much about and, as I would soon discover, totally underestimated.  After all, I reasoned, how hard could it be at 5.8?

 

The chimney was so narrow I could not turn my head from side to side in it because the length of my helmet, with headlamp attached, exceeded its width.  My balaclava restricted my voracious appetite for oxygen as I pressed with all my might against the chimney’s smooth walls to keep from sliding down the few vertical inches I had worked so hard to put beneath me.  The few opportunities I had to pull the balaclava away from my nose and mouth caused its upper part to come down over my eyes.  While in the chimney I would be forced to alternate between suffocation and blindness.  As if all this weren’t enough, the chimney’s opposing walls were pulling my rain pants down as I inched up, severely restricting range of motion in my legs and feet.

 

Finally I emerged from this claustrophobic nightmare and, after catching my breath and pulling up my pants took on the 10a crux which, by comparison to what I had just been through, felt easy.  Very wide stemming is the key here, until the right hand has just enough reach to crimp a side-pull and hoist the rest of the body up to Table Ledge, the three-inch wide ledge that marks the upper boundary of the Casual Route.  From here a tremendously exposed leftward traverse across Table Ledge leads one to the D7 rappel anchors, from which many Casual finishers begin their descent from the Diamond (another alternative is to continue up 4^th class terrain to the summit, and descend from there via the Keyhole or Cables descent routes.  The D7 raps were our chosen descent because we had left gear on Broadway and would need to retrieve it on the way down).

 

Wally rapping the Diamond in the snow (still 900 feet to Broadway)

 

As Wally began the first rappel it started to snow again, but this time the snow was attended by wind.  The descent grind had begun—one double-rope rappel followed by another in a tedious, but crucial, sequence.  One screw-up here could really ruin things, possibly forcing us to spend a very uncomfortable night hanging in harnesses from the Diamond’s barren expanse.

 

Upon arriving at Broadway the excitement of having climbed—and now almost completely descended from—the Diamond caused me to lose focus.  In pulling the rope out of my rappel rig I launched my device towards Mills Glacier.  I grunted an obscenity, noting with disgust the irony of the dual firsts of 1) having dropped a rappel device from a multi-pitch climb and 2) not having brought a spare.  Of course, this is why we learn to tie Munter knots and construct carabiner brakes, the former of which I used on the balance of our rappels.

 

We traversed north across Broadway, changed from rock shoes to the hiking boots we had stashed on Broadway before the climb, and prepared for four more double-rope rappels down the lower east face to the top of Mills Glacier.  When we arrived on its hardening snow, it was nearly seven o’clock and the sun had completely abandoned the Chasm Lake cirque.  We boulder- and glacier-hopped back to our bivy site and packed up as quickly as possible, trying desperately to beat nightfall back to the good trail.  We barely made it.  From the Chasm View cutoff, where the rocky, uneven terrain gives way to the well-groomed Longs Peak trail, we high-tailed it all the way down to the trailhead, arriving back to the car at a little after nine-thirty.

 

After a long drive home I rolled into the garage at around midnight.  I felt weary as the day’s toils began to show on me.  I shuffled into the kitchen and pulled a warm meal from the oven.  For the moment, hunger trumped sleep, and I devoured the food, washing it down with a cold beer.  This was the first regular meal I had eaten—save for a couple of Luna bars and Power Gels—in the 30 hours since Subway the night before.  I dropped my dishes into the sink on the way to bed, where soon I would drift like a snowflake into Diamond dreams.