Across the United States in the 1960s, Americans struggled to discern how the nation might become “a more perfect union.” Activists for racial, religious, economic, gender, and sexual justice demanded an end to long-standing patterns of oppression and immiseration that prevented millions of men, women, and children from exercising their rights and freely fulfilling their dreams. Simultaneously, environmental scientists and activists demanded alterations to industrial technologies and practices harmful to human and nonhuman nature—across city and suburb, countryside and wilderness.

Responding to these demands, Congress and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon approved new federal programs and legislation—most importantly, the “War on Poverty,” the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969—that revised the nation’s obligation to protect both democratic freedoms and the natural world. Transformation proved far from easy, however, as the United States faced not just new laws but also the hard work of remaking its societal norms and institutions.

Many Americans favored universal human rights and environmental protections in principle yet disagreed sharply on policy and process. Others resisted change altogether, fearing loss of privilege and unfettered liberty. Bitter controversy over U.S. involvement in Vietnam exacerbated differences on domestic policy; rancor and contention filled the body politic. When violent reaction became the preferred response of some on the Right, it provoked radicalism and the use of force among some on the Left.

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America’s national parks largely escaped the antagonism, violence, and disorienting commotion of the 1960s, but this does not mean they were exempt from strife or calls for change. With park visitation far exceeding Mission 66 projections and national concern about environmental and wilderness protections mounting, National Park Service leaders faced considerable pressure to remedy both severe overcrowding and the degradation of precious park biota.

Criticism came from disgruntled visitors, public leaders, and investigative journalists as well as park scientists. Scientists, especially, urged national parks to frame research and management programs around the goal of ecosystem preservation; in their view, this was the only way to ensure the long-term sustainability of natural resources.

As the NPS struggled to do a better job of protecting the visitor experience and natural ecosystems in existing parks, it was asked to do still more. In a world experiencing a “population boom” as well as fierce debate over the relative merits of communist and democratic systems of governance, U.S. park leaders worried that their nation—the preeminent leader of the “free world”—had too few national parks to satisfy its people’s right to wholesome leisure.

Americans in densely populated cities, especially people of color, were those most often deprived of access to a National Park System that was expected to exemplify “democracy in action.” The NPS assumed responsibility for creating and managing new parks, recreation areas, and historic sites close to the places where Americans lived, including racially and ethnically diverse cities. Emerging legislation on civil rights and the environment served to consolidate and formalize the NPS’s growing list of obligations.

In effect, against the backdrop of an entire nation reckoning with demands for transformation, national parks were asked to demonstrate more overtly than ever before their ability to make good on all their central promises: to facilitate human enjoyment in the outdoors, preserve the natural environment, and manifest American ideals of freedom and democracy. It was a tall order. By the end of the decade, the process of reinvention was still in its early stages and the NPS had not yet developed a system-wide management plan to guide change. Creating a robust ethic of care with multiple core components proved extraordinarily complex and continues to this day.

“Democracy’s Mountain: Longs Peak and the Unfulfilled Promises of America’s National Parks”

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The story of Longs Peak and Rocky Mountain National Park during the 1960s reveals in rich detail the challenges of moving toward a truly multidimensional ethic of care at the local level. The history is one of complex interactions, as those capable of supporting or resisting change in visitor use, resource management, and park democracy included federal officials and park superintendents, rangers and scientists, back- and front-country visitors, residents and business owners in the park’s gateway communities. Climbers were among those shaping the park’s present and future. They were excited, finally, to gain permission to test their skills, endurance, and courage on Longs’ “extra hazardous” Diamond wall, and Rocky developed detailed plans for managing their activity. Alpinists and park managers could not have anticipated that this one change in climbers’ access to park resources would become intertwined with questions resonating across the nation and the park system—about how best to facilitate visitors’ enjoyment and safety in overcrowded parks while also protecting threatened natural resources and advancing genuine democracy. Ready or not, Rocky and its climbers faced issues and choices about reward and risk in park settings that bore the imprint of a nation peering into its soul.

Open at Last

In the summer of 1960 Bob Kamps and Dave Rearick, two accomplished young climbers from California, traveled to Rocky Mountain National Park amid feverish speculation that officials were finally ready to open the Diamond. Rearick, a mathematician with a newly minted PhD from Cal Tech, and Kamps, a Los Angeles schoolteacher, were just two of numerous Californians with big-wall experience in Yosemite eager to climb the Diamond.

Various Colorado climbers, including Dale Johnson, Layton Kor, and Ray Northcutt, were also vying to be first on the virgin wall. On July 20, the park sent applications to all eleven individuals who had inquired about climbing the Diamond since 1953. A cover letter explained that applications would be evaluated on a “first-come-first-served” basis, with climbs permitted in August. Applicants would have to rely on their own support and rescue parties in an emergency, since the park had yet to “fabricate a cable-winch rescue device” suitable for an operation on the Diamond.

Each application packet included a list of all those invited to apply. The race was on. Rearick and Kamps, already in Estes Park, filled out their application while seated on the steps of the chief ranger’s office. They were quickly turned down. Most Colorado climbers viewed the Californians as “outsiders,” not worthy of cooperative assistance, and the men were finding it difficult to assemble the support and rescue teams the park required. Undeterred, Rearick and Kamps turned to Roy Holubar, a venerated Boulder climber and manufacturer-retailer of climbing gear; he recruited local climbers for support and rescue and helped them gather necessary gear over “seven frantic days.”

A second application demonstrated to the park’s satisfaction that the young men had the technical experience, equipment, route plans, and support and rescue parties needed to make the daunting climb. It helped the California climbers’ case that they were “fresh from a month of climbing in Yosemite” and had also proven their skills in Rocky by climbing the Diagonal on Longs. Meanwhile, the plans of the other contenders fell through. The park gave Rearick and Kamps permission to climb the Diamond, and on July 31, 1960, the four members of their support party “were promptly rewarded with the task of lugging a litter and 1,200 feet of rope up the mountain” to a base camp at Chasm Lake.

The climb itself took two and a half days, following a route Rearick and Kamps had pondered for years that went straight up the center of the Diamond. It was named D1 (or the Ace of Diamonds). According to Bob’s wife, Bonnie, both men knew there was a lot at stake. Their climb had to be completed successfully and safely. If they “screwed up,” they might be seriously hurt, and the sport of rock climbing would pay a steep price.

On the first day, Rearick and Kamps climbed well above Broadway, using direct aid and free climbing. For hours they were “drenched by water falling free from the chimney near the top of the Diamond,” and by four in the afternoon they were ready to retreat from their highest bolt. They spent the night back down on Broadway: “Our waterproof gear protecting us from the constant spray, we spent a reasonably comfortable night perched on our two by seven-foot ledge and talked over the remaining aspects of the climb.”

In the morning, the men used stirrups attached to the fixed line with Prusik knots to climb quickly to the top of the line. They then moved onto a ramp, discovered another narrow ledge (which they used that night as a bivouac), and began aid climbing a section of loose and fractured wall that leaned outward. For nearly four hundred feet they climbed behind a cascade of falling water. The rest of the day involved more direct aid climbing “up a series of blocks and overhangs.” Kamps and Rearick reached the top of their eighth pitch before dark, placed a bolt, and returned to their bivouac ledge for the night.

The next morning there was little distance left to climb after they used the Prusik knots to ascend back to the high point of the previous afternoon, but the climbers were worried that the “water-flowing upper chimney was impassable.” Happily, they were able to negotiate the chimney, even though it had “several huge blocks of ice” and “was wet and sloppy throughout.” The final (eleventh) pitch was a free climb up the chimney to the summit. “We made our entry in the register and dragged our weary bones back to the shelter hut at Chasm Lake.”

According to the Yosemite Decimal System devised during the 1960s, Rearick and Kamps’s climb was a very challenging Grade V, 5.7, A4. Interviewed by Superintendent James Lloyd a few days after their climb, “both men agreed the climb was considerably more difficult than had been expected and was certainly one of the hardest climbs in the country, primarily because of the extended areas of sheer overhang.”

Their equipment included about thirty-five of the chrome-moly pitons recently developed by Yosemite climber Yvon Chouinard, most of which they removed. These were far more durable and came in a wider range of sizes than the soft steel pitons used by most Colorado climbers, and they became the pitons of choice for subsequent Diamond climbs. Rearick and Kamps also used four expansion bolts as belay anchors, leaving them in place, and six ropes; of the latter, two were put in place for rescue purposes during the climb and subsequently removed by the support party.

They pulled a pack stuffed with extra clothing, food, and water up behind them after each pitch of the climb. Trying to keep the weight and volume of their supplies as low as possible, the men chose foods with low water content and concentrated calories, sustaining themselves on a diet of salami, pepperoni, canned chicken, raisins, and chocolate.

There had been no advance publicity about the climb, but, by the second day, word got out and people in the local area headed for the mountain. The Rocky Mountain News reported that “the narrow little trail up to the foot of Longs Peak began to resemble a thoroughfare.” Rearick and Kamps could see “spectators perched high on Chasm View, staggered out in various spots along the ridge between Longs Peak and Lady Washington, and clustered at the edges of Chasm Lake. Now and then a Park Service radio crackled and reverberated across the thin air.”

Motorists stopped their cars along both sides of Highway 7 and “peered upward with everything from opera glasses to telescopes.” Simultaneously, their feat was written up in newspapers and magazines across the country. Two days after their momentous climb, Rearick and Kamps rode in the annual Estes Park Rooftop Rodeo parade as celebrated guests. The young climbers also appeared on television news programs. Relying on a frontier vernacular that evoked deeply held national values, most news media characterized the climb as a triumph of free will and ability: two young men’s determination, daring, and astonishing skill made possible a great reward, “a victory over what was said to be the last unclimbed approach to a major mountain in the United States.”

Importantly, the editorial board of the Denver Post adopted a somewhat contrarian point of view. Yes, Rearick and Kamps had “shown what human determination can achieve.” Their climb was a “lesson” for “a society grown soft and stale,” with “much of our potentiality unrealized.” But their climb also provided a vital tutorial about the nation’s ongoing struggles over difference and equal rights: Colorado alpinists who remained resentful of the Californians “because this ‘Colorado peak’ was submitted to the indignity of ascent by non-Coloradans” needed to understand that the Diamond and Longs Peak were situated in public lands owned by all Americans.

“In fact, 37.73 percent of Colorado is owned by the federal government on behalf of all the country,” and Californians had as much right to climb in Rocky Mountain National Park as any Coloradan. Indeed, to this national domain the poorest Puerto Rican bootblack in a New York slum has as much title, if not as much interest or proximity, as the most ardent Colorado sportsman.   In the last decade recreational use of the national parks increased by 76 percent; the national forests, 150 percent.  More and more Coloradans are going to have it brought home to them that more than a third of this state has 180 million hidden owners, who we seldom see but whose influence is beginning to bear more and more on the use of “our” land.

The Post’s editorial board undoubtedly hoped to provoke reaction and debate; instead, there was silence. According to Rearick, “The excitement [about D1] died down as quickly as it started.” The public’s attention span was limited, affording only transitory consideration to dazzling climbing achievements and no consideration at all to questions about the rightful use of national parks.

Questions of democratic access in Rocky would not emerge again until 1965, as we will see below. And no one else attempted to climb the Diamond in 1960, nor did the wall attract climbers the following year as severe weather conditions sharply limited alpine adventure. There were 1,691 ascents to Longs’ summit in 1960, of which 168 were on the East Face, including D1 on the Diamond. In 1961 the total number of summit ascents dropped to 785, with only 62 on the East Face and none on the Diamond wall.

Ruth M. Alexander is professor of history emerita at Colorado State University. She specializes in the history of women, race, society, and politics in the United States, American environmental history, and the history of national parks. Alexander has conducted research for Rocky Mountain National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, and Scotts Bluff National Monument. She has written or edited two other books, and her articles, essays, and book chapters have appeared in several publications.

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