Trying to piece together a hike late last Friday evening, I recalled wanting to check out the west ridge of Teakettle, which I figured should combine neatly with Cirque. This led me to a TR by thatOneMonoskier in which the author outlined the difficulties and, basically, issued a challenge to traverse Teakettle to Cirque--well, really Teakettle to Sneffels, but I ate too much on vacation--I did however reckon the addition of Coffeepot and Kismet would be worthy of the challenge. So the plan was decided.

Now, I knew this might involve a healthy amount of class 5 with Coffeepot and Teakettle being the known quantities. I'm not much of a rock climber, so don't ask me questions like which cams were used (the jangly ones?), or the difficulty (doable by a marmot?), or why none of my photos shows another climber.

I started hiking from the bathrooms at 6, stumbling in the general direction of the Coffeepot with not much of a plan. Initially I thought I'd go up the west gully, but as imagined it looked crummy, so instead I hopped on the southwest ridge that leads directly to the peak, a decision validated somewhat by intermittent cairns. As I've climbed a bunch of hard routes in the high Sierra, this felt mostly class 1 (CO class 2) to me, but my pleasurable jaunt up the ridge ended abruptly at a 40 foot cliff. I'm not sure what the cairn people do, but since there would be some extreme soloing this day I decided to get right into it. The cliff is bisected by 3 or so chimneys, and I went up the most easy-looking and direct one. This was juggy Type 1 chimneying with a bit of spice elevatoring past a chockstone to top out. Like Coffeepot, but taller.

The ridge calmed down, and I proceeded up to Coffeepot. I'd only been up it once long ago, so it was a treat to repeat this short climb.

Back in familiar terrain, I continued over to the Teakettle and popped through the handle to see if a direct traverse towards the west ridge appeared possible; it did not. Although my backup plan was to turn a ledge system 250 feet below the peak on the south side, I hoped to access the west ridge more directly and decided to explore to the north after shimmying up to Teakettle's summit. On descent I wrapped around to the left, which led to the astonishing discovery of a pretty easy way to access (or at least descend) the climb towards the north side. Maybe everyone knows this already.

In the process I also found a direct abutment of the west ridge appeared within reach down a steep west-facing chute on the north side of the summit pinnacle, so I grabbed my pack and started down. Curiously I noticed a few footprints in this area, so perhaps this sneak is not so secret. After downclimbing a ways on solid, lichen-crusted rock, the chute met a final drop of worse composition. A jumble of sharp gray death flakes occupied the ridge to the right, with a steeper but more cohesive assemblage of gray slabs beneath the chute. Hemming and hawing, I almost bailed but decided to carry on and made a short descending traverse of the slabs, passing underneath the choss pile. It was not ideal, but it's all there.

Descending the upper west ridge, the next obstacle is a multi-tiered cliff band beneath the aforementioned ledge system that allows one to bypass the 5th class route. Following this to its western terminus, I found an obvious gully leading down beside a massive plug, with some easy scrambling near the bottom.

A couple hundred more feet of variously orange and gray chunder cookies along the ridge led down to the saddle. The general looseness of this area suggests it doesn't see much traffic, and though it probably has been done a number of times and not been sprayed about on the internet, I'm posting this TR because I need you to know that I did this.

Eyeing the 70 foot cliff band guarding access to Cirque's east ridge on descent, there appeared to be at least one viable chimney as well as a potential bypass on the east side. From below, the chimney didn't look any harder, and I was all warmed up. Sadly, confidence-inspiring holds were in short supply, and most of my time in this chimney was consumed with not ripping out the chockstones. I was glad of my direction of travel, as I definitely would not downclimb this.

I do think it's possible to circumnavigate this difficulty via a sloping, exposed, loose talus ledge on the east (climber's right) side.

Elated to have completed the last major hurdle on the traverse, I slogged on up the eternal sidewalk to within a few feet of Cirque's eastern summit, then on to the western summit. There, comments in the register reminded me LiDAR had promoted the other summit, so I headed back over there to conquer the last 3 feet. Then I contoured across to Cirque's west ridge and on down to the Kismet saddle.

At this point I was fairly gassed (props to thatOneMonoskier for going Potosi to Sneffels), but I wanted to see if Kismet is as bad all these years later as remembered--scooting along a knife edge with the rocks underneath us yeeting themselves into the abyss--and to do so in my current head space seemed optimal, so I huffed and puffed up to the east end of its summit ridge. Make no mistake, much of the rock on this peak wants out, but staying mostly on the ridge crest I found plenty of solid rock and a decent amount of good scrambling; in particular the broken slabs to climber's right on the final rise were a lot of fun, up and down.

Reversing the ridge, I surfed down the east slopes to the climber's trail and boogied out.

Unedited GPX included. Class 5 terrain is indicated by GPS confusion squiggles.

p.s. I'm sorry if this TR offends anyone; it's all in jest.