At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado’s northern Front Range. A prized site for mountaineering since the 1870s and the crown jewel of Rocky Mountain National Park, Longs has been a site of astonishing climbing feats—and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, and trash have damaged Longs’ fragile alpine resources. So too, as a nearly all-white site of outdoor adventure, Longs has mirrored the United State’s tenacious racial divides, even into the twenty-first century.

In telling the history of Longs Peak and its climbers, Ruth M. Alexander shows how Rocky Mountain National Park, like the National Park Service, has struggled to contend with three fundamental obligations—to facilitate visitor enjoyment, protect natural resources, and manage the park as a site of democracy. Too often, it has treated these obligations as competing rather than complementary commitments, reflecting national discord over their meaning and value. Yet the history of Longs also shows us how, over time, climbers, the park, and the NPS have attempted to align these obligations in policy and practice.