Just wanted to share a few tips for anyone attempting Ogallalah via Junco Lake. First, the basics:

1.) It's still a looong day hike. I got off-route a bit and logged 20 miles, but it's surely 18 miles even without that. About 5300 vertical feet.

2.) You take the trails from Wild Basin trailhead to Bluebird Lake (optionally camping before Bluebird at the Upper Ouzel campsite)

Then navigate from Bluebird to Junco Lake. Behind Junco Lake is the biggest challenge, ascending about 800 vertical feet to the easy tundra above, and then walk 0.7 miles or so over to the Ogallalah summit.

3.) You can keep it at Class 3 with good route finding, but I found rock climbing skills very useful in short sections to avoid unstable scree. It's definitely steep enough in places to give a person pause.

Now the tips:

1.) Leaving Bluebird lake to hiker's left, there are ~0.5 mi of grassy ramps from Bluebird to Junco. They have a lot of sudden cliffs that make finding the easiest path a bit of a labyrinth. On the way up, definitely consider marking a GPS route so you can find your way back - the visuals are very different on the way down and I got mildly lost and moderately frustrated finding my way back to Bluebird.

2.) Coney Pass is NOT the easiest way from Junco to the walkable tundra above. Coney Pass connects Junco Lake to Coney Lake, and if you're looking at a map, you might see it as a way to summit Ogallalah, but the ridge from Coney Pass to the tundra above is definitely 5th class. One old trip report called it "5.6-ish". It was far more than I was going to free solo, so I had to downclimb halfway to Junco and find a different way.

3.) The best way up from Junco lake is to take the grass ramps up the center of the wall, and then about halfway up, bear right to find a ridge of darker rock that is fairly stable. You can climb the edge of that ridge as steep Class 3 with exposure, or you can grind up the scree next to it and use it for navigation and stability. In so doing, you'll reach the tundra several hundred feet to the left of the lowest visible saddle point. It's possible that one of the drainages from that actual lowest point are viable, but they looked very unstable to me. Rocks were falling spontaneously every few minutes while I was there, and in one case became a fairly serious cascade of boulders.

4.) I strongly recommend making yourself a cairn, or have a good GPS marker, at the top of the wall. It is not easy to find your descent line when you come back, and there are cliffs galore if you get off track.

5.) Once you reach Junco again, you have to navigate back to Bluebird. This is tricky because the main drainage from Junco doesn't actually go to Bluebird, so it would be possible to get tracked off to the south (hiker's right now on the way back) too much and miss your ramps to Bluebird. Since you can't see this alternate drainage on the way up - and let's face it, you're probably tired by now - it's a little confusing when you're looking at the terrain on the way back.

6.) There are many ramps down to Bluebird as long as you're in the right drainage, but since I wasn't able to perfectly retrace my ascent path (even with my GPS tracker), I ended up doing a few low 5th class moves to get to better ramps. If that's not an option for your party, your navigation better be spot-on.