A Drytooling Winter Ascent of the Diamond in Colorado Sparks Heated Debate

The email arrived at 1:48 p.m. last Thursday. Subject line: First Winter Free Ascent—Diamond. Enclosed was a summary from a marketing team of what promised to be exciting news for Climbing’s audience: Jesse Huey had just realized a six-year dream of free climbing D7 in winter.

I clocked the stats in my head. The Diamond is Longs Peak’s famous alpine wall, topping out at around 14,000 feet. D7 is one of its classic free routes, with 600 feet of steep, 5.11+ rock climbing. Then I opened a file of photos, depicting Huey and his partners, Quentin Roberts and Matt Segal, torquing their ice tools into D7’s striking crux finger crack.

“Drytooling?” I thought. “On a 600-foot rock climb?”

I typed back a polite “No thanks.”

When Huey and Roberts’s sponsor Arc’teryx shared news of their ascent to Instagram the next day, I wasn’t surprised to see a slew of negative comments mixed in with the praise. “The Diamond is now a drytooling crag?” asked climber Dave Cramer rhetorically. Topher Donahue, a pioneering free climber and alpinist, jabbed: “I’m sure it was a great adventure, but I wouldn’t have told anyone.”

Climbing rock with ice axes—or “drytooling”—has long been considered fair game in alpine environments, where cold temperatures, icy cracks, and snowy crimps preclude alpinists from climbing bare handed. (Climbing editors, including myself, have always considered drytooling a form of free climbing.) But I wondered how ethical this ascent of D7 really was. Drytooling classic rock climbs at a crag is considered bad style since axe picks and crampon points leave ugly scratches on the stone and can pry off fragile handholds. Should classic alpine rock climbs be viewed any differently?

I have a great deal of respect for Huey, Roberts, and Segal as alpinists. Among other achievements, Huey has climbed the Slovak Direct (5.9X M6+ WI6 A2; 9,000ft) on Denali, Alaska; Roberts established Reino Hongo (M7 AI5+ 90° snow; 3,600ft) on Jirishanca, Peru; and Segal, with Huey, repeated The Cowboy Direct (VII 5.13a) on Trango Tower, Pakistan. But I was also confused. I didn’t know why they risked marring an extremely popular rock climb with hundreds of ascents in its 48-year free-climbing tenure. And surely slotting an ice axe into D7’s crux finger crack would have made the free climbing a great deal easier, too. So to then posit their ascent as “newsworthy”—when by all appearances they’d climbed a relatively short face in what I considered to be in poor style—was disappointing. Naturally, I had a lot of questions, so I called up Huey and Roberts while they were driving from Boulder to the Black Canyon to chat.

I can admit now: I was a bit ignorant too.

Last week was Roberts’s first time climbing on the Diamond and he surprised me with his assessment of the route this time of year. “It really took me aback how severe the winter conditions are up there. … It was reminiscent of Chamonix, or even Patagonia.” Since Longs Peak is so much taller than any nearby mountain, the Diamond receives significant high wind, he explained. At a bivy on Broadway Ledge midway through their ascent, temperatures dropped to below freezing (-18℃) and scarcely rose during the day.

That combination of weather, temperature, and snow made drytooling a logical choice for a winter free ascent, Roberts continued. While Chris Deuto, who made the first free ascent of the Diamond in winter last December, climbed barehanded on the Casual Route (5.10a), Roberts said he was partially able to do so because the Diamond’s cracks hadn’t yet filled with a winter’s worth of snow. (Deuto still suffered minor frostbite on his fingers during the ascent.) But the D7 trio encountered undeniably wintery conditions—one look at the photos confirms the presence of snow on all ledges and in some cracks.

Huey also took issue with calling the Diamond a “crag.” It does top out around 14,000 feet (4,200m) after all. If you were climbing on the alpine cathedral of the Grandes Jorasses (a similar elevation mountain in France), he’d assume you were climbing with ice axes. Huey also pointed out that Rocky Mountain National Park, where the Diamond is situated, has a deep history of winter drytooling—even on established rock climbs. Just compare Hallet Peak’s Great Dihedral (5.7) on Mountain Project with its surly winter sibling Great Dihedral to Upper Buttress (M5-): both versions are starred, celebrated climbs with dozens of ascents. “People criticized us who I know also winter climb on Hallet Peak. How is that any different?” Huey asked me.

When you consider that context, drytooling D7 in winter really isn’t that different from drytooling Great Dihedral. I did also notice that Huey’s team wore rock shoes instead of crampons on their ascent. Huey said this tactic simultaneously made the crack climbing easier and avoided damaging the rock with their front points. And, as a primarily a vertical crack climb, D7 does lend itself to low-impact drytooling since a torqued axe pick will only scratch the inside of a crack, unbeknownst to next summer’s rock climbers. Huey, for his part, noted that he has made at least one drytooling attempt on D7 every winter since 2018 and not one person has noticed or called him out for damaged rock.

While these facts have more or less convinced me that what Huey and company did up there was neither lame nor ethically wrong, I wish they had given more context when they shared photos of them drytooling a famous rock climb to Arc’teryx’s 1.7 million followers. We crusty climbers are a fanatic bunch, and many of us could quickly see the grey area of this ascent. But new climbers don’t understand the nuance of why you would climb a winter pitch with or without crampons. They don’t necessarily appreciate the difference between climbing’s time-honored tradition of drytooling frozen rock in the mountains and drytooling a sport climb in Rifle. All a neophyte climber sees is a recognizable summer route climbed with ice axes. It’s up to the disseminators of those photos to highlight the nuance.

At the end of the day, as an editor at Climbing, I’m still not sure how I feel about this Diamond ascent. If I saw someone drytool the Nose on El Capitan—clearly not an alpine environment—I’d be horrified. If I learned of someone climbing a new, 1,700-foot M7 in the mountains in the freezing cold, I’d be psyched. This ascent of D7 fits somewhere in the aesthetic middle: clearly up a beloved rock climb but also firmly an expression of alpinism, carried out by three climbers who have lifetimes of experience in those environments.

So that’s what we’re left with: no easy answers. Even so, I’m glad we’re having the conversation.

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