Pagoda mountain has some mixed reviews on this site, usually concerning the gully from Glacier Gorge to the Pagoda/Keyboard saddle. Some described it as extremely miserable, but others said it was not so bad. After our trip up there, I agree with those who say it's not so bad. In fact, it was actually even fun at times, even in the gully!

The standard route on this site, as well as some resemblance of a trail, follows a pretty horrible route up the gully. If you follow that, you'll be on loose, unstable, and dangerous rocks for the entire 1000'+ climb up the gully, and probably regret your decision to climb Pagoda. However, based on some comments on this site and elsewhere, we decided to try the slabs on the climber's right side of the gully, and found that it actually went pretty easily and even had some fun spots in there. It's not really impossible to completely avoid the loose rock, but our route managed to avoid at least 75% of the suck. I'll do my best to describe it here, but this will be pretty rough as I didn't really record exactly the route we took up the slabs.

Up to the start of the gully, we followed the standard route described on this site and it's very straight forward. The very bottom of the gully has some scree and loose rock, but the we traversed a little further climber's right (we did this on the way down, didn't see it on the way up) before entering to take a more gradual slope that makes the loose stuff very low consequence. We took this up to the middle of the slabby area on the climber's right side, and found a rock rib (circled in red below) that gave fairly easy access to the slabs above.

This required some class 3 or maybe easy class 4. I have trouble knowing where the boundary between those is sometimes. Above that, there was a couple hundred feet of easy going on slabs. They were low angle enough that it was easy going with grippy shoes. Beyond that, it went into a mini drainage of some sort that had a little bit of loose rock in it, but it wasn't bad. I didn't document that too closely, but there were numerous route options that were more solid but slightly more technical, or easier and a little loose. The next few photos are from the ascent. Overall, we followed roughly the climber's left edge of the slabby terrain on the climber's right side of the gully most of the way up.

From the top of the gully, the climb to the summit was easy and didn't take long. For the way down, we basically reversed our route on the way up, hanging on the edge of the slabby terrain. There was a bit of crab walking, but it was much more enjoyable than tripping over loose boulders!

We expected Pagoda to be mainly a sufferfest with nice views, but by sticking climber's right on the way up the gully, we managed to make it a pretty fun climb! The slabs were very solid, with just some pockets of loose rock within. Going to this side probably avoids the vast majority of the loose stuff. The worst parts of the ascent were the brief periods where we followed the thing that sort of resembled a trail going up the gully. That part was very unstable and unpleasant, but hanging further right was pretty enjoyable. I expected not to like this one, but it was far from the worst RMNP 13er I've done so far (looking at you, Copeland), Maybe even in the top half of the pack!

We started at about 5AM, reached Black Lake around 6:30AM, and summited at 9AM. After 30 minutes or so on the summit, we began our descent which was a little slower than the ascent. Got back to the car around 2:30PM.