Note: as this written version of a podcast episode once again contains several previously written reports - though with some (make that a lot of) never-before-written bonus material added on about Little Bear at the end! - I once again linked to the already-existent reports for the benefit of anybody looking to make some sort of editing/comparison study...?

A brief recap before taking a plunge into the, shall I say, invigorating alpine waters of the Colorado lake in former Spanish - not even Italian - territory that inspired this episode’s admittedly tortured title: toward the end of summer 2019, when this particular slice of my sordid fourteener history begins, I’d visited emergency rooms twice for fourteener-induced shenanigans (not in the same year); wounded myself somehow or another, including on one of the ER-prompting occasions (not just in the same year but in the span of just over two months); revisited Class 3 - more akin to climbing than hiking - out of necessity for the first time since the first ER-prompting occasion back in 2014; engaged in snow-free glissading down what would hold the title of my least-favorite fourteener for the next two years; and had exactly one vaguely likable experience on a Class 3 fourteener out of the five I had checked off by the start of this episode.

I was, in short, ready for a respite from the challenges and Challengers of peaks that required a little bit of scrambling, or, for those who have less sketchy hobbies, routes that require those aforementioned quasi-climbing maneuvers. Alas that none of the fourteeners I had remaining had a trail going all the way up them!

Fortunately, I did have a few left on my yet-unchecked list that were rated merely Difficult Class 2, so while some off-trail hiking/scrambling would be an unfortunate necessity, it would be a minimal one compared to some of the nonsense I’d had to put up with on the likes of Longs, Wetterhorn, Lindsey, Kit Carson, or Sneffels; the exposure would theoretically be less vertiginous, the scrambling less in both quality and quantity than any of the aforementioned rockpiles with altitude problems.

Unfortunately, Challenger, the aforementioned two-or-arguably-three-year top - bottom? - of my Least Favorite Fourteeners Ever list, is itself ranked Difficult Class 2, so the whole entire category had that going against it. Also going against these specific upcoming Difficult Class 2 peaks was the Lake Como Road, the only fourteener access road to receive a six out of six on 14ers.com’s trailhead difficulty rankings…in short, if one is lacking a modified four-wheel drive vehicle on which they have a diamond-level insurance policy, they’d best park near or at the base of the mountain and walk up the miles of road serving as a hot-as-hell warmup to the start of any of the “real” trails from there.

And walk - or rather, stumble - I did, as I detailed in, “Lake Como Road: So Nice, It Was Worth Doing Twice! X( ,” the trip report I wrote on Blanca Peak and Ellingwood Point, climbed September 18th and 21st, respectively (and not on different days by original intent), the two Difficult Class 2 fourteeners that would prove to be far from the crux of the 14k’ peaks surrounding a lake perhaps sullying its Italian namesake just by virtue (vice?) of its access road’s awfulness:

“We bring you this interruption in the Class 3 Climbs for the Cringing series of trip reports to talk about what I am content to call my last new fourteeners of 2019. I still have a half-written report on Sneffels' SW Ridge that I will return to soon(ish...), but before that, I felt it worthwhile to write a report that harkens back to the reason I started writing trip reports in the first place: providing beta on How Not to Do Fourteeners.

Let me start with a follow-up to the "Date Climbed" field and why it is necessary to elaborate: I climbed Ellingwood Point, the real focus of this write-up, on 9/21. I climbed Blanca on 9/18. I was hoping to climb them both in the same day via the traverse. I knew that with my documented inability to move faster than a Walking Dead zombie with rotted-off legs, it would take me all day and perhaps all night, but I had heard enough stories about the Lake Como Road that it seemed worthwhile to me to pick a nice day, bring extra batteries for my headlamp, and get the most (toe)bang for my buck.

Unfortunately, my usual paranoia about being underdressed for the cruelty of the elements at 14,000' evaded me as I loaded up Booger, my Subaru Outback, on Tuesday evening. I'd just climbed Sneffels the preceding Friday and been more than fine with my usual summer gear, itself more than most climbers I encounter wear. Blanca is also in the southern part of the state; I'd be fine!

I hadn't taken into account that I'd need to start waaaaaay earlier here than I would on Sneffels (3 a.m. was when I left Booger in her spot 1.5 miles from Highway 150 and promptly started hobbling over the baby-head rocks that congregate menacingly in the middle of the so-called road), that there would be water close enough to the road in some places to cool things off considerably, or that - and this was a critical oversight - the approach to Blanca and Ellingwood comes in from the west. Guess where most of the wind in Colorado also blows in from! And guess how much cover you have from it once you get above treeline! Hint: it's roughly the same as the Broncos' chances of making it to the Super Bowl this year!!!

I didn't get this shot until I was coming back down, but the fact that it had clouded up so thoroughly didn't help, either.

My fingers and toes were already starting to tingle by the time I reached Blanca's ridge, and while I thought about turning back multiple times, I'd had my sights set on Colorado's fourth-highest peak for a long time and was determined to slug it out all the way. Helping my decision here was the fact that the only adverse conditions were airborne; I'd tiptoed past some water on the ledges, but once above them, the route was dry. Also, the packed-down quality of the trail even through the talus sections as well as the obvious and even spacing of the cairns makes routefinding a no-brainer, even for a dolt like me (more on that to come), so I knew I'd feel like a proper twit if I had to walk all the way back down that road with nothing to show for my efforts but a vigorous 16.5 mile hike.

But seriously...the National Weather Service promised a nice day! You lying jerkfaces, blowing sunshine up my behind like that!

I didn't let conditions stop me from baring my chest, however...I paid good money for that anti-boob job, dangit!

That I spent more time shivering in the shelter than I did enjoying the lofty summit for the ~15-20 minutes I was on it sealed the deal: Blanca was going to be my only fourteener summit that day. I picked my way across the ridge, regained feeling in my toes around 13,200', and was able to shuck my jacket as well as drink my "summit" beer to commemorate Colorado fourteener #40 once I returned to Lake Como. The buzz helped for about the first mile or two down; the rest brought on a gradual souring of my mood to the point where, if anyone between 8800' and where I parked heard loud cries of vicious invective - of the kind that would make even the most battle-hardened Marines clutch their pearls - directed at the Lake Como Road between 5:30 and 6:13 p.m. (the time of my return to Booger [the footnote for this parenthetical states: “To put in context just how eyebrow-raising a 15+ hour RT time is even for me, I did the Barr Trail in 14h36m and Whitney (also as a single day) in 14h41m, and both of those were before I started taking testosterone, which has improved my times a bit! So yeah...this outing is a long and painful one”]) last Wednesday evening...my apologies.

"No way am I going back for Ellingwood this year," I told myself firmly as I headed back to Denver faster than the local cops probably would've liked. "It's getting cold enough that the water is turning to ice soon, I'll need time for my legs to forget how much fun that road is, and anyway, 40 is such a nice, round number on which to leave my count for the rest of the year! So what if I had really hoped to get 10 new fourteeners in this season, only got 9, and am thinking the rest on my list are going to be a little icier than I want to contend with until next July or so!"

That last sentence is likely explanation enough for why only three days later, I was once again saddling up Booger (as much as one can saddle up an SUV...) and fighting Friday afternoon traffic through the hellscape of construction between Castle Rock and Monument with nightmare visions of Lake Como Road in my crosshairs. My knees had decided on our last outing that Booger could totally crawl up past at least that last stretch of baby heads to 8800'; while she handled it like such a champ that I have no doubt in her abilities to do so (later confirmed when I saw her clone, down to the snot color and everything, parked that high on my way down), her driver was hyperventilating hard enough that we only got 2.6 miles off the pavement before backing into to an unoccupied pull-off.

Maybe it's because I did shave that mile off my ascent; maybe it's because I knew what to expect; maybe it's because I'd dressed for success in my Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man ski jacket, lift operator gloves, and thick socks; most likely it's all of the above, but while the road was no less abysmal the second time around, I made Lake Como itself in record time (for me, at any rate).

The only complication was that I'd apparently underestimated the amount of salt in the soup I'd had the night before and thus consumed a liter of water before I reached the lake, but that was okay, I reassured myself. There were water sources aplenty between the lake and the trail junction for Blanca and Ellingwood. I refilled my bottle at one of them somewhere near 13,000', then started chugging the cool, fresh liquid straightaway, before returning to my pack to fish out the water purification drops I had stashed in there. This, too, was okay, I told myself. I was well above the last of the campsites, and it wasn't like there was any mining activity in the area...oh, wait, except for all those old mining bores uphill that the route description explicitly said to look for. Oops...guess I'd need to invest in some Imodium-D on my way home.

Not the stream I drank from, but you get an idea of how enticing it might look after the wheeze-fest that is the road. Will update if this turns into my third fourteener-induced emergency medical services visit.

Though the split is not well-marked, I was able to identify the mine hole that at least marked my way as some sort of penance for having potentially poisoned me, and I was surprised how intuitive the route-finding was after I passed it. The cairns aren't always obvious, but as long as you stick to the middle of the slope going up to the ridge - the shallowest angle - you'll be on the right path. Cairns and trail segments are abundant and clear once you're on the ridge, and it didn't seem long before I had Ellingwood's highest Point in my sights.

Taken on the way down. If you continue straight across the slope past the circled cairn instead of switchbacking around to the next ones up, you'll have more or less a direct path to where you're supposed to go.

I had to pause 3' below that point to catch my breath. But that, too, was okay, I again told myself. Savor this moment - this is going to be my last new fourteener of 2019 for sure. Once I'd savored enough, I pushed onto the top. I tried to then tell myself that at least I would have another chance to savor my last blah blah blah, but it was hard to drown out my own cursing over having just peaked what I sincerely hoped was my last false fourteener summit of 2019.

[Residual cursing redacted.]

I reached the real summit a full hour earlier than I'd reached Blanca's days before, but despite my more favorable position in regards to sun-catching compared to Wednesday's conquest as well as my heftier layers, I was still inclined to linger only long enough to sign the summit register, marvel at the unsharpened pencil someone had left in it (at least the pen had ink!), and take some pictures of myself as well as the surroundings. Even if it hadn't been chilly on the summit, I would've held off on drinking my beer; I wanted as many of my wits about me as I could hold onto between the summit and something resembling a trail.

And furthermore, what an apparent waste of perfectly good duct tape!

And yet. Despite being no more impaired than is typical for 14,000', I still managed to bungle the descent, and so efficiently, too! The bottom line for what follows is this: stick to the ridgeline. Even if it means you have to go back up and over the false summit. Under absolutely no circumstances should you follow what looks like a trail of sorts below and around the side of the false summit that then curves back in the direction of the real summit, for that will take you down too quickly. Worse still, it will continue weaving its way down in what looks like a legit set of switchbacks, so that by the time you realize you are several gullies away from where you need to be, you may be looking just a few yards down into some nasty-looking cliffs.

If you find yourself somewhere above center-left of this photo, you done messed up.

I was prepared at that point to climb all. the. way. back up to the ridge, though I obviously didn't want to. Fortunately, I managed to find passage over a rib to the next gully over via a short set of narrow, loose-rock covered ledges that were nonetheless navigable via careful foot placement and decent handholds. I did have to scramble up scree a short ways to reach what looked like a promising notch to the next gully still; my luck held and then some, for not only did that notch provide just the access I'd hoped for, I could also see a series of cairns atop the rocks across from me!

I did not let those cairns out of my sight until I was back below the route description's poisonous mine hole, at which point they kinda peter out, leaving you to Choose Your Own Adventure across mostly-stable-but-sometimes-not rock in the direction of the main trail. Happily, though, there's apparently a limit to the trouble even I can get into in one day, and I soon found myself back on the no-brainer portion of the route, listening to music through my earbuds and taking advantage of the strangely but wonderfully empty trail (I only saw a handful of people all day) to riff on the lyrics out loud.

After having legit fun singing about Maxwell’s Silver Ice Axe, I indulged in another Lake Como beer to celebrate 2019 fourteener #10, my last of the season, and then I was on my way back to Booger. My knees affirmed that the extra mile of driving up was well worth it, though I did find myself once again hurling curses at the road as I urged Booger down it at an average of 3 mph; a joint-saver, maybe, but not a time-saver, for those pondering the walk vs. drive calculus.

And now I need to try and figure out what to do with the rest of that six-pack I'd bought for my birthday back in March that I am only now halfway through...it would seem that dumping my ex nearly seven years ago quashed just about all my need for alcohol.

As far as HikesInGeologicTime fourteeners go, this one was a classic - thrills, chills, and false summits. Still, I did manage to persevere and meet my 2019 goals despite a solid attempt to derail them off a cliff at the last second, so I can at least feel good about that. Plus, this is the first time in *years* that I've been able to call it good on a season without already having a revenge trip in mind - most prior seasons have ended in late October to sometime in November with me sucking wind and trying to shake feeling back into my hands and feet as I stared despairingly at a summit that seemed to sneer at me from hundreds if not thousands of vertical feet above, eventually and morosely concluding that it was better to tuck tail and run so that all my digits and I could reach that peak another day.

This year, I have an autumn of Type I hikes on which I can bring my real camera with minimal fear for its safety now that it's no longer under warranty, maybe some low thirteeners, and then there is the planned December summit of Bierstadt so I can finally earn a fourteener snowflake, even if it does seem like cheating to do it that way. Plus, now I'll have two or three seasons to ponder how I can channel my creative impulses 100% into my artistic endeavors with no diversions into my route-finding!”

What a happily ever after Summer, aka Normal People Climbing Season, 2019 could have had. Ten new fourteeners, a personal record for a single season, nearly half of them more challenging than I thought…nay, worried I’d ever be fully capable of! And Blanca had finally bridged the gap in climbing the five highest peaks in my state that had bothered me ever since I’d climbed third-highest Harvard in 2017, a season after fifth-highest La Plata in 2016! And I was now up to 41 peaks, so if I continued churning them out the way I had in 2019, I could be done by 2021! Plus I was clearly enjoying the hell out of my de-feminized chest!

But as I believe I have already established, apparently I do believe way deep down that there can be too much of a good thing. I can think of no other justification for why I elected to suspend my refresh and reset from Class 3. Evidently the merely Difficult Class 2 peaks had gone so well, too well, and I can only guess that it must’ve bothered me that my completed Class 3s - two of them rated Easy among that ranking - had by and large been greater sources of discontent. Perhaps I needed some sort of reassurance that continuing to pursue The List would not be in vain, that I could find some sliver of enjoyment in these next two or so Normal People Climbing Seasons (oh, how I laugh in hindsight at my naivete)!

But how to provide such reassurance at the time? September heralded the end of New to Me Fourteener season because I felt I’d already dealt with enough hints of winter on Blanca and Ellingwood, trivial as those fourteeners were compared to the rest of my peak checklist.

Ah, but as the lovers of the forthcoming lesser mountains would surely protest at me sharing their uncrowded secret, there is more - less? - to Colorado peakbagging than fourteeners! So it was that I convinced myself of the wisdom of an early October scramble so close to home it would barely be a half-day outing for a less geologically paced climber, as I detailed in “Hagar for the Hazard-Averse” of my October 8th Front Range thirteener outing:

“Sneffels' Southwest Ridge was going to be my swan song for Class 3 routes in 2019. It was fourteener #8 for the season (my goal had been 10, and Class 2+ peaks Blanca & Ellingwood would, I had already decided, be 9 and 10), it would mean ending said season with quintuple the number of Class 3 fourteeners that I'd started 2019 with (I'd done Longs the wrong, ER-visit-resulting, way in 2014; the right way in 2015; and, despite the 2014 incident having little to do with that magnificent bastard's Class 3-ness, had been too mentally scarred to try again in intervening years until I ran out of "easy" fourteeners and thus had no choice but to break the Longs Peak Curse if I wanted to keep going), and my descent of the crux wall had me convinced that I was going to die and/or break my neck in the process of Sneffels.

But since the worst that happened was that I peed myself a little - or would have, if I hadn't been slightly dehydrated - a couple weeks' time passage gave me a nagging itch of the kind that I hear could be compared to chlamydia to go celebrate Halloween's imminence by scaring myself senseless yet again. I had a couple ideas in mind for options; I didn't want to attempt a new-to-me fourteener in case conditions forced me to turn around, because I really like the idea of ending the year with no unfinished business.

My first thought of revisiting Longs, however, wasn't one I could fully talk myself into. Longs pretty much encapsulates every reason I have for doubting my chances of success on new fourteeners after September: it necessitates an at or below-freezing dark o' clock start, there are heinously long sections with no protection from the cold and wind, and there are so many opportunities to find some unfortunately located ice and snow. I then considered revisiting Torreys via Kelso Ridge, but the forecasts I read made it hard to convince myself that I totally wasn't gonna get blown off the Knife Edge when one of those infamous wind gusts battered the Continental Divide, no way!

It eventually occurred to me that I didn't have to limit myself to fourteeners, that in fact I've gotten rather into short + sweet little Front Range thirteeners in the past few weeks, and that I'd read on this very site about a short, sweet, easy-access, navigable-even-with-my-"creative"-routefinding-skills, doable-sounding-C3-crux peak: Hagar Mountain! And since I have a...sorta-cousin, once-removed? maybe? she's related by marriage rather than DNA, so I dunno, man...named Hagar who is super into Judaism (like, keeps kosher and everything, unlike my emphasis-on-the-"ish"-in-Jewish family!), and I planned to do my hike so that I'd be back in Denver by the time Yom Kippur started, it seemed like kismet!

Armed with prior trip reports, I sauntered up to the mountains at a leisurely pace Tuesday morning. I pulled off the highway (just barely - there's little more than a patch of gravel separating the parking area from I-70!) and onto the shoulder due west of the Eisenhower Tunnel and was on the trail by 10:30 a.m. I'd debated going up and over Golden Bear, but a) I'd already been up there (in large part via the magic of Loveland's Lift 9 and Ridge Cat, but still) and b) I'd felt the wind nudge at my car on the way up, so I figured I'd have sufficient fun dodging gusts for only the section of the Continental Divide between the Coon Hill saddle trail and the thirteener I had yet to summit.

Sure enough, it was a blowfest, and while I was as grateful as ever that I'd had the foresight to bundle up in my ski jacket, lift op gloves, and winter underlayers, I did find myself wishing I'd thought to at least pack my ski goggles as well. I found myself closing one eye - my left one, which is my dominant side, no less - as I conducted a staggering half-sidestep across the minor ups and downs of the mostly grassy ridgeline to the base of Hagar's false summit.

Evidence of Loveland's snowmaking efforts made me excited about the prospect of using my ski gear for its original purpose.

Here, happily, the wind died down, and I was able to focus my attention on the screefest that is the bottom part of its slope. Unlike some of the choss parades I've encountered on this season's fourteeners, however (I'm glaring at you, Challenger), this one was mercifully short, and while I naturally had to pause a few times to catch my breath due to the pitch of the slope, the walking was grassy and therefore easy to the top of the bump.

The view from that point did give me brief pause. The first and, as it would turn out, last hiker I would encounter that day had expressed her concern about my plans to go it alone, because unlike similarly rated fourteeners, I would (she warned) really, truly, no-kidding, final-warning, be going this one alone. And the crux did look...crux-y.

Still not as bad as Longs. Or Sneffels. Or Challenger, for that matter.

Still, I'd read that there was a way to keep this Difficult Class 2, if I could just find it. And the harder I looked, the more options there seemed to be. Plus, while the wind wasn't quite far enough from my path to feel like a distant recollection of a childhood nightmare, it wasn't the shrieking vortex of demons that had tried to stampede me from lower on the ridge, and I knew this was the last time the rocks were likely to be this dry this year, so it was now or never.

I wound up dropping slightly below the saddle below the false summit and the crux before starting across, then finding a decently packed-down line that did, indeed, seem merely Difficult Class 2. But I abandoned it about halfway up; I wanted Class 3, and I was going to do some Class 3, dammit! I picked a line to my left, quickly resolved that I really need to hit the gym or start doing pushups or something about my upper body strength or lack thereof, and nonetheless found myself with only one mildly tricky maneuver to make before scrambling up to the summit. A quick but careful placement of hands and feet later, another few feet of crawling over the boulders jumbled on the south side of the high point, and I was staring down at the empty register tube.

Poor little summit register tube, so devoid of meaning...

The wind, of course, picked right back up as soon as there was nothing to block it, and while I could see two other possible options for Hagar's real summit, I decided that the one I was on was good enough - the farthest away seemed to necessitate navigating a minuscule knife edge that I nonetheless didn't feel like getting pushed off by the renewed strength of the elements. I stayed up top just long enough to take some pictures, but it can't have been more than five minutes before I was hustling back down, eager for the comparative warmth of the summit pitch's sun-soaked east side.

I couldn't even unzip the jacket for this summit selfie, it was so windy! :(

I took a different path down than I'd come up; my ascent had been more to climber's left, and on the downclimb, I stuck to a path of sorts that looked like it might have been the Difficult Class 2 option I'd read about. This option nonetheless required a couple of Class 3 maneuvers of me, though I will acknowledge the possibility that they'd have been Class 2+ if I were over 6'. In any event, I found myself back atop the false summit a mere 20 minutes after I'd left the true summit - quite the achievement for someone who hems and haws in tricky terrain as much as I do!

Curse you, short genes!

Even without a trail until I'd come off the Continental Divide and re-attained the Coon Hill saddle, the rest of this route was easy - don't start going west until you can make out the Eisenhower Tunnel, and you'll be fine. I took advantage of the easy pitch and my apparent status as the only hiker in that part of Summit County to belt along to David Bowie and Bob Dylan, enjoying myself so much that it was kind of a shame when I found myself back on the road curving past the CDOT facilities and toward the shoulder where I'd parked. I reached my car at 3:40 for a time of just over 5 hours roundtrip, a number which might mean more had I known my exact mileage (I have yet to find any for the particular route I took, and I'm waiting on Hanukkah/birthday gifts or money to get a GPS).

Still, if it took *me* such a short time to do a hike, especially one with even the briefest of Class 3 moves, this should be an easy jaunt for anyone of adequate physical ability! And while I can't in good conscience recommend that first-timers to Class 3 go solo the way I did, I would happily send newbies to it up this peak; my only concern would be it offering an overinflated sense of false confidence that would result in what would hopefully only be a puncture wound to the ego when they then level up to, say, Longs. At which point, they should contact me, because apparently that mountain is as bad as gonorrhea, the way it has me burning to do it again.”

And what a way to clean the slate for the year 5780! Maybe I didn’t atone or arguably really need to atone for sucking at scrambling, not even to myself, but regardless, I felt I had set myself up for Class 3 success the following Normal People Climbing Season: that of 2020, in the Gregorian Calendar.

In fact, forget that there had only been perhaps two and a half moves on my sunset Class 3 achievement of 2019 - a true achievement in that an experienced commenter on my Hagar report confirmed that I had indeed attained The Summit of that mountain, even - that could be considered that ranking by even the most relaxed of standards. Hagar had gone so well, I decided, that when 2020 rolled around with its wide-eyed promises of a shiny new decade, I could and should progress all the way to Class 4!

And thusly does the whiplash-inducing back-and-forth across the collected remembrances I tallied throughout the start of this series up through the beginning of my 14ers.com documentation finally stop the cycle of fast-forwarding and rewinding and proceed stalwartly back to the future…present…past? Ahh, as various characters from shows in the Next Generation era of Star Trek are wont to declare, “I hate temporal mechanics!”

Nevertheless, Hagar was the last trip report I wrote and posted before “Snowflakes for the Simpering,” my triumphant tale of once again conquering the summit of Mount Freaking Bierstadt albeit in the gusting gales of full-on calendar winter, a tale bridging the events of my first summits of .com checklistable peaks between Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox as discussed during my Winterlude episodes, which means all the following trip reports to be recorded should proceed chronologically…at least, as long as I decline to take any more authorial abuses - or, liberties - going forward.

And back to that future as presented in June of 2020, the 7th of that month to be precise, the time of my next trip report detailing a return to Lake Como that would prove to be just as air-quote “triumphant” as the rest of that shining new decade was already turning out to be! In “Ropes for the Recreant,” I once again rounded up some familiar partners to prove that nothing, not even the fourteener widely considered to be the second-most difficult of The List and by some the most difficult, was going to stop my checking of every single peak on that list:

“Just a refresher for anyone who isn't familiar with my usual reason for writing trip reports: it's to prove that if I can do these mountains, anybody can. No, really. I am pantophobic. The many, many things that give me anxiety include getting out of bed, leaving the house, being the first ever recorded case of someone catching pregnancy from a bus seat...and heights. I have no functioning smoke detectors in my home because the ceilings are too high for me to stand on a chair in order to reattach them (and I get the sweats merely from standing on chairs), but getting a stepladder? And then climbing up it? And then standing on it while reattaching the smoke detector? Oh, HELLLLLLL no! I'd rather live in constant fear that some stoned neighbor's going to leave a stove on in my 124-year old, questionably modernized building!

I knew well before going into it, then, that Little Bear was going to be...interesting. Nevertheless, I'd managed to summit a smattering of Class 3 peaks last year, after having run out of the comparatively pleasant Class 1 and 2 fourteeners, and (spoiler alert) I hadn't died on any of them, plus I'd only had the beginnings of a panic attack on one! As Fall 2019 faded into winter, then, I was totally ready to Private Message SpringsDuke, my companion for a failed-for-me, successful-for-him winter Culebra attempt and successful-for-all-involved winter Bierstadt climb, to put the idea of a spring-ish go at Little Bear in his head! And then, when conditions and forecasts finally aligned for such on June 7th, to rope our fellow Bierstadt group member TallGrass, who was worried about the state of the infamous Hourglass' infamous ropes, into this cockamamie scheme! And then squeak out, "Ha! Ha! Yeah, great, guys, let's do this!" while wondering if faking a Type I diabetic emergency would be worth the hospital bill as we finalized our plans on June 6th!

I ultimately concluded that overwhelming our hospitals was a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad thing to do, especially since there's a certain notorious infection going around that would be liable to deliver a(n un)healthy dose of Instant Karma for my attempt to harken back to the days when I'd groan and clutch my stomach every time I had a homework assignment due that I'd ignored the night before, so as I drove TG and myself first to retrieve SpringsDuke, then all three of us up and over La Veta Pass, I resolved that I'd go only as far as I felt comfortable, and if I needed to chicken out and leave my partners to the rest of it, I could come back to the car and take a Sleeping Beauty-sized nap. Which was already sounding good, as I hadn't slept since Saturday morning, and it was now technically Sunday morning.

I had every intention of getting Booger, my Subaru Outback, to 8800' on the Lake Como Road, as on my last time up that deleted chapter of the American edition of Dante's Inferno, I'd seen her identical twin parked that high. After observing that both my passengers seemed liable to ruin Booger's reputation as the first car I've owned that no one's puked in yet and that I was about to ruin that day's reputation as one I hadn't sobbed through yet, I reluctantly found a pull-off 1.1 miles from the 2WD TH - the same distance I'd made the year before - and did nothing to discourage the murmurings about how we'd, like, totally planned to hit the trail as soon as we parked, but maybe a nap was in order now?

TG's commentary at the Mt. Hope A trailhead, several days later. Poor Booger.

The murmurings only lasted for a few minutes before we reluctantly decided that it would be in our best interests to do what we set out to do in more or less the manner we planned to do it, with SpringsDuke pointing out optimistically that if we got back to Lake Como early enough, we could take a nap in the afternoon's warmth. "That is so not happening," I sighed, as we started the long trudge up my least favorite stretch of any fourteener I've encountered to date.

We hit the lake by sunrise and the turn-off for Little Bear not long after. The first gully brought back wonderful memories of Challenger, and there was snow - hard snow, at that - at its top that brought back even more wonderful memories of Handies, though at least I managed to avoid splitting my head open this time. Then came the blissfully mild, if irritatingly long, traverse near the ridgeline, which offered increasingly detailed views of the Hourglass that were doing nothing for my altitude-churned GI tract.

I have never had to break trail yet with these guys, and I feel guilty for not feeling guiltier about it.

Soon enough, we ran out of traverse, minced our way up steep scree and across snow, and arrived at the base of the dreaded Hourglass. The first part of it didn't require any skills that I didn't already possess, although at one point, I did wrap the blue-and-white rope dangling down around my hand for stability while I straddled an ice patch. Then we reached the narrowest - and steepest - point.

Ice coated the middle, which looked like the most climbable portion to me. To the right of the ice was dry but slick rock that didn't seem to offer any promising holds. The left was better on holds, but they were tiny, and it was steep.

My partners, both more experienced than I, clambered up. SpringsDuke would occasionally pop into my view to shout updates at me (or try to - the gusty winds in the National Weather Service’s forecast showed up in full force and impeded communication) while TallGrass got to work inspecting and clearing ropes that, he said, had been there since his last climb of LB in 2013 or '14.

I had resigned myself to my fate of returning to this peak later in the summer, after the ice had melted, when I could climb straight up the center, so it was with an unusually Zen state of mind that I waited, watching from the side of the main pipeline as small pieces of ice cracked off and tumbled down toward and then past me. It would have to be on a weekday, I mused, because the ferocity of those ice pellets - not to mention the occasional larger, heavier missile dislodged above, thankfully preceded by a cry of, "ROCK!!!!!" in enough time for me to take cover whenever it took place - ensured that I would not want to be in here when anyone else was above, nor, if my own erosive abilities and I could help it, below me.

Taken a bit below where I waited. The iPod Touch camera isn't always the greatest at grabbing fine detail, but you can see the slickness if you're looking for it.

I was a little taken aback when SpringsDuke tossed a rope down to me and yelled what sounded like, "Clip in!" I did so, then hesitated as I examined my potential routes. I then took a step or two back to see just how far I was going to fall when I inevitably slipped. Not far at all, seemed to be my encouraging answer, so after another few hesitating moments of figuring out where exactly to put my hands and feet, up I went.

I did slip in the ice once, but it was really only the one foot that suffered for it. After that, I was almost blissfully unaware of what was happening; I had some vague sense that this was by far the most challenging climbing I'd done off a wall (and that not for a decade and a half), but I was in so solidly that even the part of my lizard brain that liked to shriek bloody murder at me about using a chair to get something off a high shelf was stupendously silent.

I did need to hyperventilate once I greeted my knights in shining nylon harnesses at the anchor, but it was only because of my lungs' natural reaction to steepness and altitude (which is to say, total toddler-esque meltdown). We were all in agreement that, even though it was now later in the afternoon than it is generally recommended for a summit, the lack of clouds and sheer amount of suck we'd put up with to get to this point meant no one was turning around here.

We stuck to climber's left the rest of the way up, and while there were a couple moves that I had to think about before committing to, either my prior experience or my newfound sense of "too tired to GAF" kicked in hard enough that I knew I was going all the way, even if I had to defy the laws of gravity to do so. The summit almost seemed like an afterthought; granted, it was now late enough that we didn't want to take too much time celebrating our victory, but in my mind, it was more a confirmation of the achievement than the achievement itself. The destination was for sure nice, but that day really had been more about the journey for me.

Thank you, SpringsDuke, for making me look good when I finally did reach the top!

We still had half the journey left, however, and while it would be mostly downhill, this was no time to slouch. With no one below us, we did take an easier, if loose-rockier, route back to the anchor station, where I got to be the remaining rope's guinea pig for the downclimb just as I had on the way up. I elected to be belayed down rather than trying to force my fatigue-and-hyperglycemia-fried brain to remember proper rappelling technique after not having done so in well over a decade.

As happened during my ascent of the Hourglass, I had a vague awareness that someone with my particular set of neuroses really should have been more freaked out than I actually was, but in addition to TallGrass (and SpringsDuke, when the former needed to pass a knot) being exceptional at belaying, most likely the fatigue and mysteriously high blood sugar had shut down much of my higher-level cognitive functions.

At least the ice had largely melted out by that point, so while the running water was almost as annoying as the wind blowing it back uphill, that middle section didn't seem anywhere near as treacherous as it had a couple hours before.

I maintained my worrisome-in-hindsight calm demeanor as my buddies descended, as we descended through the base of the Hourglass, and up until my glissade of the snowfield below it became speedier than I was prepared for. I managed to self-arrest before winding up in the pokey-looking rocks barricading its lower edge, but if you were on Blanca or Ellingwood that day and heard a profanity-laden shriek rend the very air above your head... sorry.

I would have no further incidents on winter's last remnants, which was good, as I swear the traverse back to the first gully had expanded during the afternoon, so TallGrass and I did not reach that last bothersome patch of snow until last light. Darkness set in as we picked the rest of the way down the gully, and my balance was so shot by that point that, even though I could and did manage to avoid all the remaining snowfields, I couldn't help but glissade down most of it in a way that gives an unfortunately literal meaning to the phrase "ripped me a new one."

My balance wasn't the only thing that was slipping. SpringsDuke had gotten way ahead of us on the traverse, and TallGrass got ahead of me in the gully, but he kept pausing to make sure I was behind him. As he reached the bottom of the gully, I saw his headlamp cross paths with another, and I was relieved that our group would be reunited soon. First, however, I had to get up and over one last boulder-strewn hill, but it didn't look that bad from where I stood at the bottom of the gully - why, the road was just beyond it, right at the edge of my headlamp's range!

Except it wasn't. Every time I reached the road, there were only more boulders. But then I'd see the road again, just at the edge of my headlamp's beam, and when I reached that edge...more boulders. I could feel my blood pressure spiking with each cycle. I could see no other headlamps, and while I could see mountains silhouetted against a starry sky, I was no longer certain which mountains they were - Blanca? Ellingwood? Pikes, Elbert, Longs?

I forced myself to keep stumbling onward, and I finally ran out of boulders, though I was not at the road...a stream blocked my path to it, and it was wide enough where I was that crossing didn't seem like a good idea. Fortunately, however, I could see a headlamp to my left, and as long as I followed the stream, it looked like I'd be able to reach it in no time!

When I did meet up with him across the stream at the cairn marking the Little Bear split, I think TallGrass may have obliquely asked me how I managed to stray off course - not too far, thankfully, but still off the clear path - but my internal processors were, by that point, shutting down everything besides absolutely essential functions...and maybe a few of those as well. I sat down to maybe take off my climbing helmet at last, maybe leave it on for the rest of the night, I no longer remember; definitely to tend once again to my blood sugar and chug some of the water TG had filtered while he was waiting for me. I figured I must have asked him where SpringsDuke was, since I'd seen them meet up at the bottom of the gully earlier.

"Haven't seen him since the traverse," was the answer I received, or something close to it.

I don't remember standing up again or starting to walk down the road. What memories I do have from between that cairn and the lake are like flashes of lightning: maddeningly brief, but illuminated with a quasi-supernatural intensity. But it didn't matter, I reasoned in more lucid moments. I'm on the road. The way forward is obvious.

Or so I thought, until I'd run into downed trees near the lake. Most of them I could fumble over or around, until one section with three downed trees that appeared to have fallen together. I followed them to their precipitously bent trunks in the woods beyond the edge of the road, where I stopped cold. The trees surrounding their fallen comrades looked to me to be thick - no, impenetrable - and menacing. When a breeze rustled through them, I remembered a story I'd recently read about a gathering of Fae who lured wayward travelers off into the woods, never to be seen again. Come play with us, I might have heard the trees whisper, if my Wernicke's area had still been operating at full capacity.

I stumbled as quickly as I could back to the road. The three downed trees were obnoxious, to be sure, but better to fight my way through them than be lost forever on the easy part of the route...and fight I did; I'd be shocked if I don't still have sap from the branches I broke through as I army-crawled underneath their low-lying trunks.

The next time I saw TallGrass, I babbled something about how I was kinda losing it, and that I knew he was also tired but was steadier on his feet than I was, so would he mind pausing every so often to swing his headlamp back and therefore give me some reassurance that I was still on the road? He was a little reluctant, since he understandably wanted to catch up with our faster partner as well as drop the pack in which he was carrying a substantial amount of wet, trashed rope, but he also didn't need too much convincing about my equally trashed mental state.

Brief photographic interlude to demonstrate how much beaten-up rope there was. SpringsDuke and I were carrying some of it, but...yeah. There was a LOT.

Eventually, however, the road clears of downed trees, then really of any obstacles, and while I sort of suspect that one or two of TG's and my later encounters were figments of my imagination, our last encounter occurred far enough down that I knew I could plod along back to Booger safely, if exhaustedly. I gave him one of my car keys and told him to rest and get warmed up.

As badly as I wished for the literal-in-the-original-definition rest of the night that I had managed to nudge Booger up to 8800' - I think I would have saved myself an hour or two of walking, at the pace I was going - I was somewhat relieved that I would only have to deal with so much of Como Road's nonsense on the eventual drive out. But first things first, and that first thing was sleep, something I longed for so badly that I had to double-check to make sure I had indeed arrived at last when I finally reached my car at 5:29 a.m., a full 27 hours and 29 minutes after we'd started.

The time I spent passed out in the driver's seat was enough for poor SpringsDuke, who’d had enough of a head start to get his well-deserved nap at Lake Como AND get back to the car by the time more efficient hikers were still descending from the other Como peaks, to get a ride back from the motel lobby in Alamosa where he'd spent the night (it had not occurred to me to pass out any of my spare keys early enough in the trip - mental note to self in the future) with a sheriff's deputy who handed us a bag of snacks, asked us a few questions to make sure we were as all right as circumstances would allow, and drove away relieved (I would imagine) that that was the extent of his involvement.

Especially considering...remember when I mentioned that I'd used some of the blue-and-white rope to help steady myself crossing an icy section of the Hourglass on our way up? I sure regretted that decision after I got to see just what other, higher portions of that rope looked like!

I made sure to flip Lake Como Road off with both fingers after I was refreshed enough to drive it for the last time. My third and final outing could have gone significantly better - all the apologies to both my hiking buddies, especially for the parts of the night they spent waiting around in the cold! - but it also could have gone significantly worse. Either way, I think I have earned the right to never set foot or tire on it again.

For the moment, I'd still prefer to die of smoke inhalation than get a stepladder, because I feel like it'd be pretty hard to set up a belay on one of those.”

And if all that sounds bad, just wait until I take this opportunity five years later to add the details I left out of it because it was already going on too long (oh, how I laugh now that I have multiple trip reports posted that were solidly in the five digits for word count; this one only totaled 3210 in its non-typo-free original form that I chose to leave as-is on that early version as opposed to taking the liberty of, like, actually reading over my work and making corrections the way I tried to for the script of this episode), details like how the snow at the top of the infamous First Gully was so hard when we started up it that morning that, after the three of us had donned our microspikes and the first of us - TallGrass - took his first step atop it, he immediately grumbled, “Oh, I wish I’d brought my crampons,” prompting SpringsDuke and me to exchange A Look best summarized by that meme of the monkey puppet giving some serious side-eye.

Other originally discarded details got left out because they were downright embarrassing in how foolish and neglectful they made me look. But now does seem to THE time to lay all my sins bare, so as with the addition of moments I failed to include in the first edition of recounting SpringsDuke’s, TallGrass’, and my last collective outing on a winter Bierstadt, I might as well throw in the added recollections that bolster my retrospective notion that maybe all the anxiety I referenced in the beginning of the Little Bear report was a sign that I perhaps should have quit while I was ahead, if not well before.

I suppose I do have justification for not quitting while I was in the Hourglass, though, seeing as how communication with either partner was rather tricky due to the winds whisking most of our words away practically before we could utter them. I would have had to rely on interpretive dance to communicate to SpringsDuke that during the time he and TallGrass were hacking away at the no-longer-usable ropes dangling down the feature that gave Little Bear such a sordid reputation, I had developed cold feet, literally as well as metaphorically, and the extremities chilled by standing in nearly-frozen water for that long already had the disadvantage of having learned to dance pretty much exclusively to the “Macarena” at my cousins’ bar mitzvahs, so I highly doubted the effectiveness of my ability to get across the message that I was done for the day.

Besides, I did have a rope once it became clear my day would be proceeding upward! Never mind that, as TallGrass later reported he observed in horror when I finally reached the anchor station from which he was belaying me, it had been too long since I had last gone climbing and therefore didn’t know how to tie in properly. He and SpringsDuke and I had done a refresher on the basics of rappelling at Duke’s house the night before, and with that far fresher on my mind than…however one was supposed to use the rope for going up - I honestly had no memory on that occasion - I had clipped in as if in preparation for rapping. Most likely we should have reviewed ALL the basics of rope use, up and down, but I suppose it was only fair to think that no one in our group would need the rope for ascent, seeing as how 2 out of 3 managed just fine without.

Regardless, I did make it up as well as down the Hourglass without incident, and because Little Bear did the opposite of discouraging me from pursuing further scenarios that were too sketch for my ultimate liking, I would even go on to relearn how to tie a figure-8 knot, a bit of information I still use to this day when I opt to serve as the Designated Belayer for my friends who don’t get the residual anxiety pukes at the mere thought of climbing anything precipitous enough to make a climbing harness and something to attach to it seem like required pieces of safety equipment.

My next scene from the Director’s Cut of Little Bear also centered on an interaction or more with TallGrass specifically and is in fact arguably more his memory than mine. This bonus cut took place on the upper part of our descent down Lake Como Road hideously late that night, presumably sometime after I’d had the freakout about being certain that if I stepped off the uppermost portion of the road to circumvent the downed trees obstructing it and into the woods, the Fae would whisk me away for good, and wouldn’t that be a real shame after I had already survived the worst parts of the second-worst fourteener to not even be able to check it off my .com checklist due to the Fae’s aversion to the metal in my cell phone and all, not to mention the high unlikelihood of getting a signal that far from civilization.

Anyway, after a round or two or maybe three or four - keep in mind that I had been awake for going on 48 hours by this point thanks to a sleeplessness borne out of sheer Little Bear-anticipation-induced anxiety - of me catching up to my shivering friend who was dutifully waiting for me at various points along the road as I had requested, TallGrass remarked (he claims) that it seemed like I was grounded enough that I was able to stay on the now-obvious road without assistance, and as it was really REALLY cold in the dark with all the breezes stiffening out of the San Luis Valley floor below us, would I mind giving him my car keys so he could get a steady move-on back to Booger and get his body temperature back up?

He then told me that whatever I had to say in response had nothing to do with cars, keys, or anything else related to our situation, so he gave up, started hiking again, stopped to wait for me farther below, even tried to take a quick nap before deciding it was too cold for that to be a good idea, and had to rinse and repeat a couple of times before I either processed what he was asking and/or figured out on my own that he looked cold and, since I was feeling more confident in my ability to fend off the Fae by staying on the road, maybe he should go get Booger warmed up for his own sake as well as my eventual one.

I can’t be 100% sure this next encounter happened due to the lateness of the hour and that it had been almost exactly 48 hours since I’d last slept by this point, but I’d put a greater likelihood on it taking place than on some of the ones I thought I’d had with TallGrass. I had rounded the last switchback in the heinous monstrosity that can barely be called a road and was trying to distract myself from the misery of stumbling along the baby-head-sized rocks filling it by staring at the bright, nearly full moon dominating the sky.

Two other hikers, both guys, I think, were just starting their day. I didn’t recognize their clothes as belonging to either of my partners, and hardly being in a conversational mood, I may have given them a terse nod or even pretended not to see them at all and kept hobbling along over the unevenly shaped so-called roadbed.

They stopped, however, and the beams of their headlamps followed me as I tried to death-march past them as nonchalantly as possible.

“Are you all right?” one of them asked.

That did get me to stop, or maybe the rolling nature of whichever rock I had just had the misfortune of putting the wrong part of my foot on did so. I recalled Longs Peak, the last time some kindly strangers had asked something to that effect, and how I had most decidedly not been all right on that particular day, and I was pretty sure I was not all right on this occasion either.

But this was my third time down Lake Como Road. I knew the baby heads were a pain in my feet (and, if not careful on those, my rear) that I absolutely could have done without, but once I reached them, I only had a mile at most - perhaps even less, since I had been walking them for some distance already - to where I was parked. I had insulin in my system this time, and while the sleep deprivation was adding up, I hadn’t had a full-on delusion on the level of being convinced I was sure to be kidnapped by the Fae if I stepped off-road since, well, being convinced I was sure to be kidnapped by the Fae if I stepped off-road. This time, I was fairly certain that my current problems would be easily resolved if I just got back to Booger not too far ahead and caught a few hours of sleep before heading back to Denver for some real shut-eye.

Of course, as I gave the two hikers a brusque, “Yep,” maybe added on, “Have a good one,” and continued mincing down as briskly as one can mince, it did occur to me that I’d spent a decent amount of Longs convinced that if I could just get back to Booger’s predecessor Dirtball, blast the heat, and stretch out for a nap, I’d have been just fine, and of course if I had managed to do that, I likely would’ve entered kidney failure…but that, I firmly concluded, was totally different.

And it actually was. This time, I made it back to my car on my own, and truly not much after that last hiker encounter that I’m at least 85% sure was real. I promised Booger I’d give her a big ol’ hug and kiss later, but for that moment, it was time to take out the valet key I’d kept in my own pocket (having given TallGrass the real key with no clear memory of why I hadn’t kept that one for myself), unlock and open the door efficiently but quietly so as not to wake him or SpringsDuke up…

Half-decade belated apologies to anyone else sleeping, or trying to, within four miles of the start of Lake Como Road that morning. I was arguably even more unaware about this than I had been about proper rope-harness interfacing for ascents rather than descents, but it turns out that when you use the valet key to enter a 2015 Subaru Outback, even if it is the correct valet key to the correct car, it will set off the car alarm. And of course in my stuporous state, it took me a few minutes of panicking before finally figuring out how to turn the damn alarm off.

Rather than being audibly cranky at me when I did get Booger settled, however, TallGrass merely rolled over in his sleeping bag and began gabbing at me as I fished my own out of the backseat and reclined the driver’s seat for that long-anticipated nap. I grunted in response to most of his excited chatter…including when he wrapped up with, “Oh, and I haven’t seen SpringsDuke. He must’ve gotten a ride into town.”

I really have no good excuse for why this piece of news wasn’t even more alarming than my car’s boisterous reaction to the valet key had been. By now, my sleeping bag and the seat were arranged in such a way that I could finally have that sweet, sweet reunion with Morpheus at long last if TallGrass would just. stop. talking, so even though I think it had crossed my mind to reflect that it was kind of odd that I hadn’t heard a peep from our third partner - whether from the backseat or the trunk he could theoretically have found some hollow in all the gear I stored back there he could’ve used to stretch out in - during all the commotion, as far as I was concerned, TG had handed me another lifeline with the optimistic suggestion that Duke had found somewhere more pleasant than poor Booger to hunker down for the night.

Luckily, TallGrass’ optimism turned out to be right, as I discovered when I startled awake a mere two or perhaps three hours later to a banging on my driver’s side window. Just as luckily in my own admittedly skewed and still sleep-deprived estimation, my Kansan partner was just as ready and willing as he had been with me a few hours prior to talk at the Alamosa County Sheriff’s Deputy who barely had a chance to introduce himself before being steamrolled by my suddenly alert friend while I blinked dazedly at the deputy as well as SpringsDuke, grinning and waving behind him.

The fastest of our trio had indeed had the time to at least attempt a nap at Lake Como on his return to it for a while since he’d reached it with a bit of daylight to spare, but when TG and I still had yet to make an appearance once the sun was setting, he decided to proceed downhill. He returned to Booger most likely before TallGrass and I had even exited the infamous First Gully - the one coated up top with crampon-worthy ice in the morning and occasionally waist-deep slush in the late afternoon - and, lacking any copies of my car keys since I hadn’t thought that far ahead despite already being well aware of our differing paces, decided to hunker down as best he could beside my vehicle, using it as a wind shelter of sorts.

This was unsustainable, however. The breadth of the San Luis Valley separating the base of the Blanca group from the distant San Juans to the west is agoraphobically vast, and with most of Colorado’s winds coming from some sort of westerly direction, there isn’t much in the way of protection from them. Duke was dressed warmly enough for continuous movement in such winds, but trying to merely relax, much less sleep, in them was impossible. So he used his own powers of extroversion to make new friends with someone heading down from higher up Lake Como Road who dropped him off in one of the nearby towns before they continued on their way.

Alas for him that his wallet was locked in my vehicle. I would hardly have faulted him if he’d used a rock to retrieve it - most likely I wouldn’t even have noticed when I first returned to Booger, given the state I was in at the time! It did mean, however, that when my poor speedy partner entered the motel his ride had driven him to, he had no way of booking a room. The staff on duty were sympathetic, however, and let him sleep on the couch in the lobby.

He was able to get a ride back to Booger the next morning when he went into the county sheriff’s office. The deputy who did come knocking on my window after transporting SpringsDuke the couple miles of “road” had of course been prepared to start a full-on Search and Rescue mission, given the information - or, critically, the lack thereof - available to him, since all he knew was what Duke knew, which obviously wasn’t a whole lot.

However, as our trio’s collective hero finally managed to make clear once TallGrass and I were distracted by the bag of breakfast groceries he brought (fruit, muffins, and yogurt, all of which were enthusiastically received…mostly the fruit and yogurt for my part, because it turned out that I was also still a bit dehydrated and that the muffin was too much for my desiccated soft palate to handle without screaming) just in case we had indeed managed to return to the car merely fatigued, hungry, and sleep-deprived, the fact that we were merely fatigued, hungry, sleep-deprived, but safely in the car and insisted we needed no further attention was the best kind of Search and Rescue mission he could hope for - and not just because the court appearance he’d had scheduled for that day had been rescheduled just in case it did turn out to be an All Hands on Deck scenario, so now he had the day off!

I know I got more sleep once I’d given my final two-finger salute to Lake Como Road and pulled over on paved road to let TallGrass take over for the drive back to SpringsDuke’s home. I’m sure we both spent most of the rest of the day asleep once we returned to mine. Maybe I managed to fully pay off my debt to the sleep bank in the days between Little Bear and TG’s and my next adventure that thankfully wasn’t actually much of one on 13k’ Centennial Mount Hope A.

But back to what I would consider a very-much-adventure on Little Bear and what I took away from it, besides the lingering sensation that I need to be very, very careful whenever I step off a designated road or trail through the woods lest the Fae find me at last.

As alluded to in the text of the original report, I was metaphorically smacking myself in the head for not taking into account the known differing paces of my group members and planning for what to do if I did not in fact bail early enough into the proceedings to be the first one back to my own car. In some small modicum of fairness to 2020 Me, noping out some distance below the summit and urging my stronger partners to go on was an option to which I’d become somewhat accustomed, and especially with minimal Class 3 experience to go on - mostly not-great, at that - before tackling Class 4 did have me putting my semi-conscious odds at 50/50 of bailing vs. summiting, perhaps even more like 60/40, so all of my group-splitting contingency plans made prior to the trip were banking on the not-insignificant chance that I’d reach the base of the Hourglass, reflexively vomit, and flash a peace sign at my partners before hightailing it to the best of my ability back to the First Gully and Lake Como Road beyond.

But damn do I wish I’d at least reformed my plans once we were all down the Hourglass and it was clear SpringsDuke was having a much easier time with the ups and downs along the ridgeline linking that precipitous feature with First Gully than either TallGrass or I were!

Granted, I suppose changing the outcome of the events to come once night fell would’ve required somehow getting him to stop so TG and I could catch up and I could give Duke the “real” car key, a prospect that seems unlikely given that I was incapable of going any faster than I was and that I don’t recall the winds receding enough that I could’ve shouted ahead, but if I had absolutely no choice besides a Groundhog Day sort of scenario where I was forced to repeat June 7th, 2020 all over again, I would’ve had us discuss a decent descent strategy once we were all safely at the base of the Hourglass and handed out a key (I only had the main and the valet on me that day, though I did have a spare set in Denver) if/when agreed upon by one partner or the other.

And indeed, after that, I did make sure to hash out better contingencies for exchanging keys as needed on future hikes where I was either the slowest to descend when I did summit or the first to come down by virtue of developing gurgle-guts somewhere below the crux of a route that I felt would be pushing past the limits of my abilities for one reason or another.

As is the case, however, with at least two prior episodes of this podcast, one could have a spirited debate over whether or not I learned any of the lessons that I most badly needed to learn. I would come down on the side of, “No, I most certainly did not.” Never mind that, even then, I chalked my ability to have summited Little Bear not just that day but at any point in time ever to the happy happenstance that TallGrass just so happened to be planning a visit to Colorado right when SpringsDuke and I had our eyes on our state’s widely considered second-hardest to hardest fourteener and that the climbing-expert Kansan was amenable to that particular repeat, because without him belaying me, I do not think I would have surpassed the Hourglass.

Never mind also the fact that, while Little Bear did not thoroughly justify my anxiety over it and some the way that, say, Longs Peak had nearly six years prior, I still had a hellacious day, hellaciousness which then spilled over onto my partners. And honestly, given the abilities of all the parties involved (mostly mine, and that being the case, make that inabilities), what happened was surely one of the best possible outcomes for that particular sequence of events!

But did I take the opportunity to do some serious self-reflection after I was back in Denver…well, scratch that, because TallGrass went back to Denver with me on that occasion, and as much affection as I have for him, it is rather hard to hear oneself think while he’s around…okay, do some serious self-reflection after he returned to his own home and consider just how close to disaster we had all come on Little Bear; how little fun I’d had in the process of barely staying on the right side of the non-disaster line; how I had five more fourteeners in a similar class yet to be summited, and who knew whether I’d be able to get TallGrass or someone similarly skilled at ropework to pull me up them if they turned out to be just as far above my literal and metaphorical reach as the Hourglass; and how all but two of my remaining non-Class 4 fourteeners were Class 3, which did at least seem to be within my limits but wasn’t overall pinging my Fun Meter, either? Did I have a stern come-to-, uh, Moses moment where I told myself that maaaaaaaybe, just maaaaaaaybe I’d proven enough to myself with the fourteeners I’d already climbed and that any further self-torment meaningless to anyone besides myself would be just that?

Spoiler alert: let’s just say that I kept writing trip reports that I plan to continue recording. And not only would I fail to realize that maaaaaaaybe Class 4 was, at best, a push of my athletic skills as they stood, but I would go on to fail at Class 5 as well, though fortunately roped as I had been on Little Bear! I’d even get SpringsDuke to partner with me again on the fourteener most widely regarded to be the very hardest, and on that occasion, with no TallGrass or ropes present, not that I wouldn’t have been open to either or both!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. After all, doing so might prove to be a surefire way to end up arse over teakettle…and let that spoiler for those familiar with Colorado’s most challenging thirteeners serve as a metaphorical as well as arguably literal cliffhanger for that episode to come.