To skip the backstory/training and go straight to the climb, continue to the bolded heading labeled "Diamond Day"

Table of Contents:

-The Backstory

-The Training

-Diamond Day

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The Backstory

"What if we climbed the Diamond?" Clark asked me at the beginning of the summer. I chuckled a bit, thinking he was joking, but he kept staring at me, totally serious about this idea. We were confident on moderate trad climbs, but this seemed to be a whole new level of difficulty. The two of us had been climbing partners for a few years and we had done ample 14er scrambling and plenty of front range climbs together, in addition to a few bigger objectives like the Grand Teton last summer.

"Let's keep it in mind," I replied. "If we feel prepared near the end of the summer, how about we give it a go?"

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The Training

In mid May I returned to Colorado for the summer from college out of state, in a place without mountains. I had taken a job as both a climbing and whitewater kayaking instructor at a summer camp, and was itching to get back into the mountains during time off. I was determined to make the most of this summer in Colorado before heading back to school in August.

5/22/25

Merely 2 days after returning to Colorado, I decided to take advantage of the remaining snow and get a quick ski lap of Dead Dog Couloir in.

I started from the lower trailhead and immediately felt the altitude kick in. Turns out that this would be a challenging undertaking after living at sea level for several months.

I had a rather leisurely—altitude exhausted—skin up the normal route on Torreys before dropping into some perfect corn in the couloir. Not a bad way to end the season after a 5 month break from skiing!

I was reminded of just how incredible the high peaks of Colorado are and knew that a big objective would be in the cards for this summer.

6/8/25

After a few lengthy weeks of back-to-back work, schedules lined up for Clark and I to do a quick climb close to home. We settled on Satan's Slab in the Flatirons as a slightly tougher Flatiron climb that neither of us had done.

It was somewhere on this climb that he planted the idea of climbing the Diamond. We were both pretty excited about the prospects of doing so.

It became clear that at this point the Diamond was the unequivocal goal for the summer, and it was time to train. Game on.

6/14/25

Eldorado Canyon proved to be the perfect playground for pushing our trad climbing skills in preparation for the Casual Route. We had previously climbed Rewritten a few times, along with the Bastille Crack, but were still newbies to the canyon. After some research, we realized we would need to up our crack climbing game for the Casual Route, so we decided to push our grades in that department in Eldo. First order of business: Gambit.

Gambit is one of the crack climbing moderates in Eldo, and it's well worth a visit. It is usually uncrowded because of the longer approach hike, and feels significantly more wild than many of the other climbs in the canyon.

This route is nothing but fun and seemed to be great training for our goal. I was humbled with my lack of crack climbing skills, but it was a relatively forgiving place to practice. As will become a trend in this report, Clark is a far stronger crack climbing than I am.

We decided that, at this pace, a week I had off from work in mid August would be the perfect window for an attempt on the Diamond.

6/21/25

Time to get back into proper alpine shape. My brother had become a very fast distance runner on flat ground but was eager to get into more alpine terrain, so we did the Arapaho traverse as his first real ridge scramble. The altitude was still slowing me down a lot despite being back in Colorado for more than a month already, but things were improving.

6/23/25 - The longest climb of the training

Clark and I had set our sights on Kiener's Route a year ago but opted for Cables instead that time due to a deteriorating weather forecast. This time, we were back to use it as training and a trial run for an extremely long alpine day on Longs.

We left the trailhead just before 2:30AM, and we were greeted by a concerning fog by the time we were crossing the talus above Chasm Lake. We discussed and decided to tentatively continue on since we were armed with a good weather forecast and since Longs has a way of creating its own micro-climates.

The fog lingered during the Broadway crossing, making for some dramatic landscapes.

THE move on Broadway came and went and provided great fun the whole time.

A major focus of our training was dialing in our technical systems and transitions. This climb was perfect practice for these systems—we took advantage of the variety of terrain, built plenty of natural anchors, and sped up our transitions.

Around the end of Broadway, I started feeling a bit nauseous and exhausted beyond what I've ever experienced on a mountain before. Still, we continued on.

Despite some route finding errors and interesting climbing in mountain boots, we made it up Kiener's chimney and to the upper ramp.

I was feeling sicker on the upper ledges and needed to stop seemingly every 30 seconds due to stomach pain. However, the fastest way to bail seemed to be to go over the summit, so on we continued. The "Diamond step" move near the top of Kiener's was far easier than I expected, making for simply a talus slog to the summit, almost 9 hours after leaving the car. We hung out for a few minutes before heading over to the familiar Cables rappels.

With an almost 15-hour car-to-car time, this was one of my longest days in the alpine yet—a nice practice run for the endurance test of the Diamond.

6/28/25

For a quick weekend jaunt with our friend Grant, we headed to Eldo again. This time, we waited in a long line to climb Wind Ridge. I found the pitch 3 overhang horn to be surprisingly difficult, but good practice nonetheless.

We decided to make it a multi-sport day by kayaking the town run of Boulder Creek afterwards.

6/30/25

The trio was back for a quick sport climbing day in Clear Creek, where we climbed Black Gold and Guppy. After Guppy, we rigged a rappel down from the belay cave into the river to get a nice dunk on a hot morning.

7/1/25

After Kiener's we figured we were fairly prepared for the long alpine day that the Diamond would bring, but we still needed to push our grade on technical climbing, so it was back to Eldo to climb The Yellow Spur. This climb seemed to be just the right level of challenge, and had engaging, varied climbing. I understand why it's a classic. I am also still baffled at how the first ascent was done in hiking boots.

We somehow managed to take over 2 hours to make it back to the car as a result of problems finding the Vertigo rappels. We thought we might do an easy climb on the Wind Tower afterwards in order to get some extra mileage, but the heat had rolled in and it was already 95 degrees, so we decided to call it a day.

7/15/25 - the final exam of the training

We figured that harder Eldo crack climbing was a necessary prerequisite, so we headed to Handcracker Direct. After waiting in line behind a group of guides doing some training, we hopped on the first pitch.

After fighting for several minutes to successfully get one of our cams un-stuck from the first pitch, I led the second pitch and had some difficulty with the steep hand crack right above the belay, but made it through.

I was all too happy to let Clark lead the crux pitch since I still didn't feel very confident with my crack technique.

Clark flashed the crux pitch with some shaking near the top. I thought I would be able to make it up without issue since I was following it, but ultimately fell due to pump at the steep part. Oh well. After a bit of rest I continued up to the top.

Again, we wanted to go for the extra mileage so we did the short jaunt down to the base of Rewritten and decided to climb it for speed since it was now so familiar. We climbed it in just under 2 hours from base to summit; our technical systems were getting more efficient.

7/20/25

One of my fellow climbing instructor coworkers and I had talked about doing a climb together at some point this summer, and we settled on climbing Keyhole Ridge on Longs for a relatively chill ridge romp.

We arrived at the trailhead around 3:15 AM and had to park a little ways down the road, which I guess is to be expected during a summer weekend. We made good time up to the false keyhole, and began the ridge climb that was filled with ample type 1 fun—perfect for his first proper alpine climb.

We arrived at the crowded summit plateau and hung out for a little while before doing the familiar Cables rappels. At Chasm View, I took this photo:

We made it back to the car a little over 10 hours after starting—a relatively short time for a climb on Longs.

That night, I texted Clark the photo above from Chasm View, noting how glad I was that we were planning on doing it on a weekday to hopefully avoid the crowds. He replied that his schedule for mid August had changed, and that we would need to attempt the climb on one of the upcoming weekends if we wanted to do it this summer. Oh no. I felt somewhat prepared for the climb, but it seemed far beyond my comfort zone and a bit beyond my comfortable climbing ability still. Still, we tentatively scheduled our Diamond climb for the following Saturday and hoped we'd be ready.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Diamond Day

7/26/25

Our day began the night before, right after I got off work. I downed a pizza as fuel for the next day, and Clark and I met in Boulder before heading up towards Allenspark to catch a few hours of sleep.

Shortly after midnight, after about 3 hours of cramped and restless sleep in the back of Clark's car, our alarms went off and we pulled into the trailhead parking lot. At 12:30 AM, the parking lot was ALREADY full, with a significant portion of the cars belonging to hikers illegally camping. We parked just down the road.

Knowing the risks of being caught in the Casual Route conga line late in the day, we were determined to be first on the route. I enjoy a good alpine start, which comes in handy in cases like these. We started up the trail just before 1 AM.

We passed four groups of keyhole hikers on the way up to Chasm Junction, but, confident that there were no headlamps ahead of us, we decided to pause for a longer break at Chasm Junction.

The fact that it was only 2 days after a new moon and that the skies were clear brought about one of the most incredible sights I have ever seen in the mountains:

We turned our headlamps off and just admired the sky for a little while.

As we saw a headlamps pop up above treeline, we decided that that was our cue to continue moving. Now familiar with the terrain after Kiener's, we made quick work of the talus past Chasm Lake. We wandered around for a few minutes before finding the correct entrance point to Mills Glacier and the North Chimney.

While many groups wait until dawn to enter the North Chimney in order to ensure that they enter the correct weakness in the Lower East Face, the slab at the base of the route has a fairly recognizable "toe" to it that can be identified by headlamp light, even on a dark night.

"Let's see how easily we can kick steps," I declared. I kicked my approach shoes into the snowfield and the essentially bounced back without leaving a mark. It turns out, radiative cooling still happens in the summer, so the snowfield was bulletproof. Seeing as the crossing was short and not unreasonably steep, we each grabbed sharp rocks and kicked whatever steps we could until reaching the base of the rock. This was obviously less than ideal, but it did the trick.

We ascended the North Chimney quickly, just as a line of headlamps became visible on the west side of Chasm Lake. The moves on the slab to looker's left of the gully proved to be slightly tricky, but provided a nice respite from the choss chute in the heart of the chimney.

We topped out on Broadway right at dawn, giving us a second wind after the sleep deprived slog up to the chimney.

We wandered around a bit to confirm we were in the correct place on Broadway for the start of the route, before taking a quick break on our starting ledge at the base of the route.

Since Clark is a stronger crack climber than I am, we decided that he would take the first pass on the crux pitch. Working backward with swinging leads and combined pitches in mind, we calculated that Clark would combine and lead the first two pitches so that it would be his turn by the time we got to the crux pitch.

Eager to get going, we set off.

One thing that I did not anticipate from this climb was the tedium of the hanging belays. I had done a handful before this climb, but never so many in one go. 3 out of the 6 belays we used on this climb were hanging, and they grew uncomfortable fast. On multiple occasions my feet started tingling from lack of circulation due to sitting in my harness for so long. Clark took the first hanging belay at the top of pitch 2.

I didn't take any photos on the pitch 3 traverse since the belays on either end were hanging. However, the improbable-looking traverse was fairly tame in terms of difficulty of the moves, though it was quite exposed. It's crazy to think about how daunting this pitch must have looked to the first ascent party.

Since we were no longer the only party on the route, we continued quickly up the moderate pitch 4 chimney to the ledge at the base of the "money pitch."

It was my turn to lead at the "money pitch," and I found the dihedral surprisingly challenging. From photos it appeared that it would be a nice stemming corner. What I did not expect was 200 feet of steep sustained lay-backing in the corner. I placed, by my count, 16 pieces of protection on this pitch, because it was rather sustained and the exhaustion was setting in.

Another party was catching up behind us so we made our transition quick on the ledge at the top of pitch 5. Time for the crux pitch. Clark sighed and then set off.

He worked on the challenging crack on the crux pitch for a little while before taking. After a short break, he kept going until I heard him yell "oh shit."

The rope tightened through my belay device before I felt a sickening pop, then it tightened again. "A marginal stopper I placed popped and the just cam below it caught me," Clark said through the radio. He seemed understandably rattled. "Can you lower me to the ledge?" He asked.

I lower him down to the Yellow Wall Bivy Ledge just above, and he built an anchor and belayed me up to that ledge because we had another party on our tails.

"You want to give it a go?" He asked.

"Not really, to be honest, but I guess I'll try." I could feel the exhaustion getting to me.

I started leading up the pitch, and I immediately knew that the fatigue was going to prevent a clean send of it for me. Around the place where Clark fell, I placed a slightly under-cammed .2 in a shallow crack, pulled up on it, and took. As I was hanging there, I felt another terrifying pop as the .2 blew out and I fell momentarily before being caught by the bomber .5 merely a foot or two below it. That moment of free fall was brief, but felt like an eternity. I took a moment to regain my composure before pulling up to the base of the squeeze chimney.

I clipped a slung chockstone/constriction before poking around on the face outside the chimney. The chimney was narrower than my shoulders and seemed improbable, but there were a few holds on the outer face. Pulling onto some decent crimps and small feet, I tried my hand at the moves outside the chimney.

"Falling! Falling!" I peeled off as the slung chockstone caught my fall. Clearly the outer face wasn't the play in my fatigued state. At this point, the group below was waiting on the Yellow Wall Bivy Ledge for us to hurry up and finish the climb.

I took my pack off and dangled it from my harness with a quickdraw. I did a series of uncomfortable shoulder jams, for lack of a better term, up the interior of the chimney. While I'm sure this was fairly tame as far a squeeze chimneys go, my training for this section was woefully inadequate—this part was undeniably a humbling experience.

I finished the chimney and looked at the final 10a crux crack. I tip-toed my way up it and pulled on gear almost immediately—I had no intentions of falling again on this pitch.

I clipped to fixed stopper anchor at the hanging belay before saying those magical words: "off belay."

With the aid of some rest, Clark managed to free every move the pitch, with just a single fall near the top.

We breathed a sigh of relief that the crux was done, and started across the Table Ledge traverse pitch.

The climbing wasn't too difficult but it was wildly exposed.

As we arrived at the end of Table Ledge, we exchanged a fatigued fist bump and drank the last of our water.

Mission accomplished.

We scrambled up the upper ledges of Kiener's and reached the summit just after 2:30 PM—my 10th ascent of Longs. The weather was a bit moody but seemed to be blowing past us to the south.

We sat in great satisfaction on the summit for about 20 minutes, while also dreading the long, dehydrated walk back to the car. "Casual" by Chappell Roan seemed to be a fitting soundtrack for the descent.

The Cables rappels came and went in an exhausted delirium, and so began the trudge back down the hill.

We made it back to the car almost 18 hours after we left, where we promptly downed our extra water before driving home. I slept for almost 11 hours that night.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Thank you to everyone who climbed with me during these adventures. I'm really grateful to be able to call Colorado home and to share these beautiful places.