Longs Peak via Keyhole Ridge (5.5-5.6) and Cables (5.4)

The best prep I found prior to this climb was Lisa Foster's video and Steph Abegg's excellent topos. We had a total of 4 belay stations, similar to this one from Mountain Project, but we opted to not use the last belay station (furthest left).

A friend had a Boulder Field permit with the intention of summiting Longs via a new route, Keyhole Ridge. So we hiked in Friday afternoon and set up camp. The creek was running, but finding a viable area to refill took a bit of work. The best spot to refill is before the camp sites where the stream is wide and obvious. We ended up filling further up the boulder field, but not too far from camp. The next morning, we headed up to the Keyhole for a quick view of McHenry's. We started across the 4th class ledges around 6:30am. We were at the False Keyhole by ~7am.

At the base of the 5.4 pitch, there's a pretty wide staging area, and even though the beginning looked inviting to solo it made more sense to rope up here. The climbing did get tougher towards the top, so it was nice to be on a rope. After we topped out on the first 5.4 section, there's an option to switch over to the West side for a 4th class variation, but we continued up the East side and headed up another 5.4 pitch.

At the top of a fin is where the downclimb crux is. It's not a huge drop (~8ft) and if the boulder blocking the exit wasn't loose it wouldn't be a bad down climb. And in fact, there were plenty of people soloing that day that managed to down climb it. But it's position makes it a natural spot to want to grab. If it were to fall, it's going straight down the standard route onto The Ledges. The wall directly below the boulder isn't very featured either. There is a cordelette above the boulder that appears to be a hand line. We opted to rap this short section.

This immediately leads to the class 4 ledge on the west side, followed by an easy ramp that puts you at the base of the 5.5/5.6 pitch. One of our climbers started up the face while the rest of us chose to start on the arete before transitioning over to the face. I noticed a couple of soloers traverse the face about 20ft before heading up. As we got higher up the route, we started to angle slightly left under 2 diving board shaped rocks somewhere near the ridge. The climbing difficulty eases as the route traverses the face. We stopped when we reached an area with an 8ft crack. 2 of our climbers decided to continue traversing and found an exposed but easy route towards the ridge, while my partner and I went up the crack. I was able to get in 3 good steps which got me high enough to reach the top and mantle up. This move was pretty fun and I'd recommend giving it a go. From here we were able to stop using the rope.

After this was a nice easy ledge leading to a 4th class chimney, followed by a series of easy ledges. This is where we transitioned back to trail runners. Then there was one final section with a 4th class chimney on climbers left or a ramp that went right and at class 3. From here it's class 2 to the summit.

For our descent, we took the Cables route. There was a faint trail leaving the summit but it's mostly choose your own. There are grass ledges off in the distance that are a good target to aim for. We eventually came across the first eyebolt, from the eyebolt you can clearly see the second eyebolt. So we scrambled down to the second and used the 60m rope to descend this section. At the bottom, I made it down a slick ramp to get to the third eyebolt where we set up our final rappel with a 50m rope, that just reached the bottom.

Second eyebolt location according to GPS (40.25698, -105.61657).

Trail Stats: 16.32mi, 5182ft