How Many People Climb Longs Peak by the Keyhole Route?

The Keyhole, seen from the East Longs Peak Trail. NPS.

The question

Longs Peak is one of the great attractions of Rocky Mountain National Park. Heavy use of the East Longs Peak Trail raises safety concerns, damages vegetation, overloads trailhead parking and wears the trail. Good use estimates help the park deploy staff and money.

Overnight use is easy to count from backcountry camping and bivouac permits. Day use — the question here — is not: how many people hike the trail, and how many reach the summit by the Keyhole Route?

The study

From 2002 to 2004, George Wallace, Matthew Bates and Jerry Vaske of Colorado State University placed infrared trail counters at 59 backcountry locations. On Longs Peak in 2002 they set two:

Making the counts reliable

• Observers periodically counted hikers by eye at the counters to work out a calibration ratio.
• The counters sometimes failed, so the researchers divided the total days in the season by the days actually counted.
• Total use = counter count × calibration ratio × that days ratio.

The Trough, seen from the route. NPS.

Results

• About 35,000 people hiked the East Longs Peak Trail between May 30 and October 14, 2002.
• About 9,600 of them reached the summit by the Keyhole Route.
• The first Keyhole summits came on July 7 and the last on October 8; most were in August and September.

Caveats

• Weather largely decides how many people summit, rangers say, and summer 2002 was unusually hot and dry — so the count may not be typical.
• Not everyone at the trailhead is aiming for the top: many head for Chasm Lake or Estes Cone.
• Some climbers reach the summit by other routes, including technical ones, which the Home Stretch counter would miss.

Chasm Lake from the summit of Longs Peak. NPS.

Sources

Based on "Climbing the Longs Peak Keyhole Route," by Paul McLaughlin, Rocky Mountain National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The summary is not a statement of park policy.