Detterline made his 300th ascent of Longs Peak on July 6th, 2008

By Mike Oatley of the Estes Park Trail-Gazette

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

For Jim Detterline, summiting Longs is something he just has to do. And do. And do.

On Sunday, the longtime ranger (25 yrs.) on the mountain made his 300th ascent of Longs, two days after making number 299.

The climb, made via the Kiener route, put Detterline in company where the air is just as thin as it is atop Longs. Shep Husted, a long-time guide in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, made 350 ascents. Enos Mills, whom Detterline says “probably loved the mountain more than anybody,” made 305. Bob Bradley, who still lives in town and cut his teeth on the mountain in the days when climbers had to supply their own rescue crew, notched around 300 trips to the top.  (Mike Donahue wasn't one to count summits but he made well over 300 ascents of Longs Peak during his 20+ year career guiding the many different routes up this northern most, "14er" in Colorado.  Mike died from cancer in 2006. -eli)

In Detterline’s way of looking at things — and despite many solos among his 300 climbs — he’s never gotten there alone.

“We climb on the shoulders of those who were there before us,” Detterline said the day after his landmark climb. “I’ve gotten to know a lot of the old guides from the Boulder Field era, the real pioneers. It’s been a real thrill because (the mountain) attracts a certain caliber of person to it.”

                         The north (sunlit) and west (shadowed) faces of Longs Peak in the early morning sun.

And the mountain has exerted powerful force of attraction on Detterline. The 52-year-old native of Pennsylvania coal country first started trying to climb Longs in 1979. In his first trip out west, a buddy who worked in the Park’s backcountry office gave him a two-week introduction to Longs Peak. He failed to reach the summit on his first attempt, by the Black Dagger route on the Diamond, the mountain’s 1,700-foot east wall, when a terrific lightning storm chased him down. But the mountain had its claws in him.

“I was fascinated by both the big wall and by the peak itself,” he said. “It has so many different facets.”

Defeat in his first attempt only made him resolve to get to the top by way of the Diamond, eschewing hikes as a way to just make the peak.

“I made a pact with myself then and there,” he recalled. “I wasn’t going to the summit until I had succeeded on the Diamond.”

He finally did, in 1985, meaning he has averaged more than dozen trips to the summit a year since. Along the way, he opened up new routes on each of the mountain’s four faces and set a few standards. He made the first ascent of the 1990s — and the last. He went two years and six months with at least one ascent each month, the longest streak. He’s done both the east face and the north face in every month on the calendar.

“I’ve had a lot of good times with a lot of good friends up there,” he said.

He has also had some wild times with a lot of wild weather up there. When he and an old friend from high school set out to be the first people to reach the summit on New Year’s Day, 1990, they found themselves clinging to the mountain and crawling to the summit in extremely high wings.

“I wouldn’t do that today,” he admits.

On another climb on the Diamond, he was hit by lightning and left blinded for 45 minutes — 40 feet above his climbing partner, who had to talk him down.

“A casual route turned into an epic route,” he said. “I couldn’t see anything at all.”

His eyesight slowly returned, and they finished off the peak.

                                                  The east face of Longs Peak reflects the sunrise.

“I do it because I enjoy the good physical workout,” he said, explaining his love of the mountain. “It’s a very varied peak. It has incredible winter ice routes, it has the best alpine snow climbing in the Park, it has easy rock climbs. You can go up and down the old cables route fast. A lot of people cut their teeth on the Keyhole route. It has something for everybody.

Through the harrowing adventures and as his climbs to the peak accumulated, the mountain kept revealing new aspects of its character to him.

“I learn something new nearly every time I go up there,” he said. “It might be finding a flower species I hadn’t been aware of before, and I’ll come home and work it out in a guide book, or it might be a new corner of the mountain when trying to push up a new route. Or it might be a personal thing, when I find I’ve passed some old record or physical limits. It might be seeing the joy in someone else’s eyes when they do it the first time.”

When Detterline summited on Sunday, a minute before 10 a.m., he was alone on Longs Peak. The way it worked out, his girlfriend was laid up with a sore knee and none of his other regular climbing friends could make it. It was snowing.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Here it was the July fourth weekend, and I was up there by myself.”

He signed the register — erroneously dating it July 7, he later realized, after the group that had hit the summit ahead of him had also dated their entries a day ahead — and then he headed back down. He was back at the trailhead by 12:30.

Detterline can not touch the mountain’s record roundtrip of two hours, four minutes and 30 seconds, but he can get to the top of Longs and back in about five hours. He does not know how many more trips to the summit of Longs Peak he has left in him. But he won’t be stuck on 300 for long.

“Maybe some night I might run up after work,” he said as he prepared for the 17-day climbing trip in Peru he leaves for later this month. “I hope to do number 301 by next Saturday. We’ll have to see how the weather is. I’m doing it one at a time.”