Longs Peak
— — the mountain Enos Mills climbed at fifteen.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat-topped granite summit at the southern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, the only fourteener in the range. The east face — the Diamond — drops nearly two thousand feet in one wall. The Keyhole Route is the standard line: a long pre-dawn start from the trailhead, the Boulder Field by sunrise, the Narrows by mid-morning. Snow holds on the upper pitches into July. Enos Mills, who climbed it more than three hundred times, lived just below. From Estes Park the peak is the first thing the sun finds. — from the studio
Longs Peak, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Longs Peak rises to 14,259 feet (4,346 metres), the highest summit in Rocky Mountain National Park and the only fourteener in the Front Range north of Pikes Peak. It sits on the Continental Divide in northern Boulder County, Colorado, about ten miles south of Estes Park. The granite of the summit block is roughly 1.4 billion years old, intruded into the older metamorphic country rock of the range. John Wesley Powell led the first recorded ascent in 1868. The peak was named for Major Stephen H. Long of the 1820 U.S. expedition that mapped the southern Rockies.
The east face of Longs Peak, known as the Diamond, is a near-vertical granite wall about 1,000 feet high above Chasm Lake, one of the premier big-wall climbing venues in North America since the first ascent of D1 by Layton Kor and David Rearick in 1960. Above 13,000 feet the air carries roughly 60 percent of sea-level oxygen. Afternoon thunderstorms build over the Divide nearly every summer day; the National Park Service standard is to be off the summit by noon. Snow lingers on the upper pitches well into July most years.
The Keyhole Route is the standard non-technical line and the only route the Park Service rates as a hiking route, though it involves Class 3 scrambling above the Boulder Field. The round trip from the Longs Peak Trailhead is about 14.5 miles with 5,000 feet of elevation gain. Most parties start between 2 and 3 a.m. to be off the summit before afternoon storms. The route is considered out of season once snow returns in September. Permits are not required for day hikes; backcountry camping at the Boulder Field requires a permit from the park.