Episode 185 - Longs Peak

Otherworld

Alex Waterfield, a chef and avid hiker from northern Colorado, recounts a harrowing solo climb up Longs Peak, known as the state's deadliest mountain. While navigating

Key takeaways

• Alex Waterfield, a 37-year-old executive chef from northern Colorado, shares his experience hiking Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
• The Keyhole Route is described as extremely dangerous due to sudden weather flips, ice fields, and exposure drops exceeding 800 feet.

Main topics

• Longs Peak hiking dangers and terrain
• Winter mountaineering gear and techniques

Notable quotes

"I don't remember how I got down. And he seemed really confused by it."

Conclusion

The episode blends extreme mountaineering realities with a chilling paranormal mystery, ultimately

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:17) Welcome to the other world. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. Speaker 2 (0:22) This episode comes from a guy named Alex Waterfield. He's 37 years old, from northern Colorado. He is a chef and also a very experienced and avid hiker. Alex's story takes place on Longs Peak, which is said to be Colorado's deadliest mountain. Now for me, growing up in the infinite flat landscape of Illinois, we had nothing like this hike. In fact, I don't even think I could have comprehended a hike like this while I was growing up. I always knew parks to be managed outdoor spaces with trails and signs and rangers or some kind of help nearby. More like a city park than real wilderness. They were places that had A metaphorical safety net. I never felt like I could be in actual danger besides maybe getting poison ivy or something like that. Later on, though, I moved to Montana and ended up visiting a lot of the national and state parks around the country. I was very shocked at how dangerous many of the trails were and how vast and unforgiving the wilderness was. One slip on an exposed edge can mean falling hundreds of feet. The weather can flip from sunshine to lightning in an hour and help maybe half a day away if you even have cell service to call for help. A while back, I had just finished a hike late in the season and noticed a very dusty car parked at the trailhead. In fact, my car and this dusty car were the only two cars left in this parking lot. And it had multiple parking tickets on the windshield. This car really caught my eye because it looked like it had been there for at least a week. I also noticed that it was a rental car, which seemed pretty strange. I was curious, so I looked in the window of this car, and it didn't look abandoned. It looked just kind of like your car would look if you were planning on leaving it for a couple hours, like you were going on a hike. They had drinks, a backpack, personal items sitting out. It just clearly did not look like a car somebody left there on purpose. Later that night, when I was back in cell reception, I looked it up and saw a news story about a hiker who had just died on that trail recently. It was a man on a work trip who decided to go hiking on his day off. He slipped on a particularly dangerous cliff and died. Now, I don't know why his car was still sitting there. Maybe the rangers didn't realize it was his car. Maybe they didn't get around to towing it out of the park yet. Either way, seeing that abandoned car was a very haunting image that has stuck with me for a really long time. I think because it made me realize how quickly things can turn for you, even in a place that feels so safe and so beautiful. In this episode, Alex sets out for a hike that is significantly more dangerous than that trail where I saw the car. And as he moves through the many difficult sections of this hike, he has a strange encounter that he has never forgotten. By the way, if you want to see some visuals of this trail, We're going to include a few links to photos in the description of the episode. But for reference, I would say that for most of this hike, it's not so much a trail as it is moving across and up a giant frozen cliff. Speaker 2 (4:18) This episode is called Long's Peak. and you're listening to Otherworld. Speaker 2 (4:29) This is Bobby. At its core, the science you Speaker 3 (4:32) can't argue with. A story about all of Speaker 2 (4:34) a Speaker 3 (4:34) sudden. Speaker 2 (4:35) Up in the sky. Speaker 3 (4:38) I'm literally, I'm gonna die. His limbs were just like, wrong. Speaker 1 (4:43) Everybody moves back into the light, Speaker 3 (4:44) even if it takes them a minute. Speaker 1 (5:17) My name is Alex Waterfield. I'm 37 years old. I'm an executive chef in northern Colorado, and I like to spend a lot of my time playing music, doing fun art things with my friends, and then as much time in the mountains as I possibly can. Climbing, snowboarding, all the cool things you can do if you live in Colorado and your backyard is just the most fun mountain playground you can ever imagine. And my story comes in one of those mountains. There is a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park called Long's Peak. And it's kind of legendary. It's on the Colorado Quarter. It's the most frequented 14er. A 14er is any mountain that the peak reaches beyond 14,000 feet. I don't know how many are in Alaska. Colorado has the most in the contiguous United States. California has a few. I think Washington has two of them and then Colorado has 52. And of those 52, Longs Peak is known as being the most deadly, which is simply because it's the only 14er in Rocky Mountain National Park. So it's frequented by people that aren't prepared. And a lot of times what will happen is there are... thunderstorms that roll in unexpectedly, or there will be ice on exposed part of the mountains that like novice climbers just aren't expecting or have the gear to handle or a combination of those things. So I believe somebody dies almost every year on the mountain. Speaker 2 (6:56) What got you into hiking in the first place? I Speaker 1 (7:00) attended a wedding close to Denver where the person that invited me, my date to the wedding was in the wedding. So while she was doing a rehearsal dinner or whatever, I kind of fucked off and went to the movies. And it was one of those movie theaters where they served beer. And they were playing the movie Everest, which I always had kind of like a passing interest in the mountains. Living in Colorado, I drive past them every day. Like it's pretty remarkable. Anybody who's driven down I-25 in the front range of Colorado, you could just look to your right and see just the most magnificent, like picturesque mountains. So I've always had like a very pedestrian interest in mountains. Something about seeing Everest and having like two beers made me really emotional and like about the mountains. And I remember thinking, dude, this could be me. I could be... I could be a mountain person. And so some of my hardcore friends, like everybody has friends out here that are either hardcore into technical climbing, which is like climbing with gear or ropes, or the opposite of that, alpine climbing, which is what I got really into, which is you don't bring any technical gear. You just sort of free solo your way up and down the mountain. Or like snowboarders, like we all know pretty gnarly people out here. So I got with one of my gnarly people and we planned to climb Longs Peak. And I didn't know anything about Longs Peak. I didn't know. I didn't do any research for it. We just went and hiked it. And at first, it seems like a pretty basic hike. A very difficult one because it's so steep. The trailhead starts at about 9,000 feet. So you're doing 5,000 feet of elevation gain. And even for somebody that grew up here, that is quite a bit of acclimation for your lungs. altitude sickness is very common. I can always tell exactly when I'm at 12,000 feet because my body starts really fighting for air. That's where I really start to huff and puff. But the first part of the hike, like I said, is a pretty basic, simple hike. And then you go through what's called the keyhole. And then all of a sudden, it's like you're on a different planet. And the first time I did it, we were in the perfect conditions, maybe the best conditions I've ever seen up there. No wind, the sun was out, not a hint of a storm cloud in the sky. So the first time I did it, it was pretty magical. But it's intense. There's a lot of scrambling, climbing up rocks that are the size of like semi trucks. And a big thing you have to worry about is rock fall. So I was learning a part of the mountain called the trough. Everyone would yell rock. And you're supposed to stay like 100 feet away from everyone else in case someone knocks a rock above you, down to you. Obviously, it would take you out. And so I got to the summit there. with my friends and we all came back down and everybody was in the worst mood ever because it's such an intensely long hike. And we were making jokes the whole time that somebody moved the parking lot on the way back down. We made it back to the trailhead and everybody was fine. One of my two friends that I went up there with was kind of having a very slow moving panic attack the entire second half of the climb. And so they were stopping a lot and I ended up going up ahead and waiting for them on the summit and we all came down. My point is they had a terrible time and I had the best time ever and I knew I was going to go back. So I started just kind of knocking off Colorado 14ers. And there are a lot that are dangerous in the way that was attractive to me where it really felt like you accomplished something if you could go up and down. But Long's Peak is very close to where I live and I started to find out I would look up people do it in the wintertime. And so that's what I kind of became obsessed with. And to set the scene during winter conditions, you don't generally see other hikers up there. If you do, it's like really hardcore, famous mountain climbers that live in Colorado. I was coming down one day and I saw Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell climbing part of the peak. I met John Krakauer on Longs Peak one time in the winter. And it's just like... It's this very barren place because it gets so remote and sketchy. Speaker 2 (11:23) I'm imagining five to six specific dudes listening to this episode right now nodding along to those names. Very impressed. Speaker 1 (11:34) Well, Alex Honnold is the free solo guy. Speaker 2 (11:38) Oh yes, of course. Speaker 1 (11:39) There are only hardcore people up there and you don't really need to do the standard route. You don't need ropes in the wintertime. but you need the utmost mental clarity and you have to have a pretty good grip on your own risk management, I would say, which comes kind of into play with my story. But there's a part of the mountain called the Narrows. Basically, it is a foot and a half path going along the mountain for maybe an eighth of a mile. Maybe that's maybe not quite an eighth of a mile. Really, really fun in the summertime. But as you're hiking across it, if you look to your right, it's just a sheer 800-foot drop. So if you slipped right there, there's no chance you would survive the fall. And then in the wintertime, that little pathway has a giant snow-packed mound of snow going over it. So you're basically climbing over the narrows on a giant piece of ice. So you need crampons or ice axes or both. It's a very small part of the mountain, but the exposure is such that if you're not stuck to the mountain, like if the wind blows a little bit and you step wrong on ice, it's certain death. And it's where a lot of people have slipped and fallen and died. And even when people survive it, it's very, very, very hard to mount a rescue, especially that time of the year in the wintertime. There was... A time I was up there in October, which isn't quite winter conditions, but usually it's very intense and windy and there's a lot of ice and snow up there. I checked in at, there's like a little sign-in spot right after the ranger station, like one of those steel boxes that closes and opens, almost like it's bear proof, where people can sign their name. And somebody had hung missing posters for a guy named Ryan Albert. from some town in New Jersey, Hazlet, from Hazlet, New Jersey. And I found out... Speaker 1 (13:48) From the missing poster, where he went missing, hikers contacted him at a spot on the mountain called Granite Pass, which is kind of the gateway to the sketchy side of the mountain. And they said he was going the Keyhole Route, which is the standard route, which is the one that I'm going to talk about, and had been missing for about a week. And I kept going and I got to the Boulder Field, which is a place if you get a permit, you're allowed to camp. And there was a man up there who claimed that he was a private investigator hired by the family of Ryan Albert because they were really upset that the National Guard weren't willing to hike into the wilderness to look for him, which made perfect sense to me. And I was telling this guy that beyond this keyhole, which we could see from his campsite, the weather is really inhospitable. It's very slow moving. And it just so happened that... The day after Ryan attempted his hike, we got like three feet of snow up there. And I told the guy, I was like, I'm pretty sure just based on the route, I could tell you exactly where they're going to find the body next spring. And I thought they were going to find that he had tumbled down what's called the trough and he was just going to be at the bottom of that. And next spring, that's exactly where they found the body. So it's like, it's very... not for the inexperienced, but even sometimes experienced people get into some trouble up there. So the standard route is called the Keyhole Route. There's this giant rock formation that you're heading towards the entire hike called the Keyhole. And once you climb through the Keyhole, it kind of feels like you crossed into another dimension. I was up there a week ago, and my friend Liz and I crossed through the Keyhole, and her hands froze, and mine were... pretty cold too. And it was so intensely windy. I think it was like 80