I just wanted to describe how awesome I thought this route was and also add some thoughts. I tried to follow the 14ers guide closely.

1. Getting to the base of the Y-couloir: 14ers guide says to cross the outflow stream coming from the small pond above the waterfall and approach the rockslide from there, but I ended up re-joining the Ellingwood Point standard route before starting up the rock slide so it seems like you could potentially stay on trail until you reach the base of the slide. THE SLIDE: I felt very uneasy on this slide. There were lots of large rocks that I didn’t know if I could trust or not. I ended up crawling to the far right end of the slide fan and hugging the cliff there to get into the couloir. I basically hugged the right hand wall trying to use holds on the wall to make my way up staying off of the precarious seeming rocks in the couloir. Despite the exposure on the ridge this seemed like the sketchiest part of the whole route.
   
   
2. The Ridge: I can’t say enough how fun I found this. Blew Kelso Ridge out of the water. Continuous narrow ridge spine action with plenty of climbing and cool traversing. Regarding the “spine” in picture-6 of the guide, I went what felt like a little too low to get around that, not sure, but I had to climb more than I wanted to back to the ridgeline. I’m curious if anyone knows if you can just go directly over this or if the rock on the spine is too rotten?
3. The “headwall” section (pics 8-9): The left face is how I climbed it. It seemed that farther to the left was steeper and less featured, farther to the right (closer to the ridge) had poorer quality rock. There’s a Goldilocks line in there. Careful of holds and perched stones if there are climbers below you.
4. The “gash” (pics 12-13): this section gave me quite some pause. Down in the gash I visually felt that climbing straight up the center back on to the ridgeline was doable and I made a couple of moves. Doubt crept into my head though bc the 14er pics showed the line going off the ridgeline to the right side and climbing up under the ridge. I also noticed that the rock on the wall directly going up from the gash was pretty flaky and broken. I ended up squeezing down a tricky spot on the right of the gash to get to the line going up the right side. This felt sketchy bc I had to turn around and down climb on that flaky rock with a very steep and nasty couloir at my back. This also felt like a sketch-crux of the route. Climbing back to the ridge was, luckily not bad at all and did not resemble the nasty dirt cut-arounds that one must continuously endure on Kelso Ridge.
   
   
5. The “horn” (pics 15-16): I ended up down climbing the backside of the horn fairly directly and it felt alright.
6. The “remaining easy talus”: actually gave me a little trouble. There seemed to be a route going off right after the red crumbling rocks but I couldn’t really figure that out. I went back and climbed fairly straight up from a bit to the right of the red crumbling rocks. It was alright but a little sketchy. It was fairly steep and there were a few pretty big loose rocks. Are you supposed to wrap around right and go up? I couldn’t really figure that out and didn’t see any cairns.
   
   
7. Overall: I had such an excellent time on this route. I felt that it blew Kelso Ridge out of the water in terms of fun, narrow ridge scrambling and just being able to stay ridge direct for almost the whole route! Kelso felt like kind of a bummer that the guide keeps having you go off of the ridgeline and scooting through lots of steep, loose dirt and rocks only for basically three cool cruxes which are each over as soon as they begin. I wonder if anyone had bets on whether you can stay ridge direct for more of Kelso or if it’s rotten rock on those ridge spines. All in all, this seemed like a way more fun and exciting way than the Ellingwood standard route. I’d caution climbers about the Y-couloir and make sure partners give each other a lot of room in there.