Thanks everyone! We did end up doing little bear NW face and the traverse. It was a great challenge and awesome capstone to this season considering snow may prevent any more challenging routes.
OldTrad wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 9:03 am. If climbing that section of the ridge twice seems too daunting then perhaps reconsider whether you are comfortable, ready and confident enough to be up there at all.
All that aside, be safe and have a blast!
To clarify, I meant that it's an ADVANTAGE to upclimb and scope out this section before downclimbing it. But, this downclimb is actually easier than downclimbs just slightly further on the ridge. It wasn't hard enough to warrant choosing NW face for that reason, although NW face is also a perfectly good way to get up Little Bear. SW ridge sounds terrible, hourglass would've been fine, but NW face is a good alternative if you want to avoid rockfall.
We ended up relying most on this trip report:
https://www.14ers.com/php14ers/triprepo ... trip=19042
The information that we most needed and couldn't "Intuit" was:
* Bypass the first big tower on the right
* Summit the 2nd 2 towers because there is actually minimal downclimb on the other side, even though in-person it looks like there would be a big downclimb.
This is different from what Justiner said. Nothing against Justiner's route, I just happened to be referring to the trip report instead of this thread lol.
We didn't summit captain bivwacko of course. I didn't see why anyone would be tempted to summit it. There is obviously a a downclimb on the other side.