motivated to formalize a route on Little Bear that avoids the infamous Hourglass, daway08 has been very busy on Lake Como Road this year! it was really exciting to join him for his FIFTH trip up that route this summer to finalize landmarks and waypoints that would be useful in his new route description for the West Ridge Indirect route.

the proposed trade-offs:
Extreme ⚠️ Rockfall hazard in the Hourglass for
Extreme ⚠️ Exposure on the west ridge.

okay, i’ll bite. i am not an exposure-junkie like David, but it is not a factor that inherently gives me pause and i can’t say the same of having my head blown off my neck by a falling/flying microwave-sized rock.

YMMV, but here’s how it went for me:

[skipping over the drive to trailhead, parking at 9,850’ switchback, 4am start to Lake Como, and heavy wildfire smoke]

the West Ridge Indirect route “begins” when you gain the ridge (and reclaim your sanity) after exiting the first gully on the other side of the boulder field as soon as you peel off from Lake Como/Blanca Peak Road. there is a surprising amount of Class 2 hiking here and the climbing on this ridge doesn’t exceed Class 3+ difficulty. it is solid and around 10’ wide for most of the way, but the exposure is significant.

you can stay on this ridge all the way to the top of Little Bear (aptly named the West Ridge Direct route) but there is some extremely exposed Class 5 climbing involved. that’s where the new West Ridge Indirect route comes into play: it drops from a large notch the ridge before the climbing gets more difficult and re-routes/side-hills across a pretty average talus field, which is a mix of Class 2 hiking - Class 3 climbing before entering the next gully (the Nike Swoosh) to regain the ridge and return to the difficulties of the route. with that said, there appeared to be an abundance of Class 4 territory between the notch and the summit. and it’s possible that leads to my next point:

there has been some conjecture about how the remaining ridge route goes from there. i agree the route is primarily Class 3, but i found (where me = someone who enjoys scrambling, has done 50 of Colorado’s 14ers along with more than a hundred summits of random 12ers and 13ers, is generally unbothered by exposure, is not a trad or sport climber, and is 5’4”) more than just "a couple" Class 4 moves. they were particularly problematic for me because the mountain was flaking and crumbling in my hands to a point that i didn’t trust using 3 points of contact to get by. so whether that qualifies as Official™ Class 4 or not, i can't say. but i threw a few tantrums on this route.

the first tantrum was completely avoidable and totally my fault for committing to a bypass that kept me below the ridge a little longer. the short version is that David and i both agreed the bypass is not worth mentioning in his route description. i went up and over K2 both ways on Capitol so can't be certain, but i imagine it’s similar to circumnavigating K2: the ridge is way better, just do it.

when we reached the summit, we met someone who had come up just a bit before us via WRI: she was 1” shorter than me, standing on top of her 51st 14er, and had completed the Crestone Traverse the day before. this person had 100% of my attention while she repeated the exact difficulties i was protesting on my way up. it was eerie how aligned our experiences were:
- the hand holds we wanted to use kept releasing from the mountain
- we were alarmed by how many rocks were wobbly
- we both took the bypass to stay lower on the ridge longer and deeply regretted it.
- we were both unable to complete the crux move. we agreed that because of our height it was harder than the 5.easy bulge move on the Crestone Traverse, and the “bypass” was sketchy class 4 that we didn't want to repeat.
if you can reach the horn and pull yourself up, just suck up the exposure and do it because the workaround was tricky [insert second tantrum]

thankfully on the way back, i found the crux move to be way easier to downclimb but then (lol) arrived at a different area where i was struggling to hold a piece of the ridge that wouldn’t break off in my hand [insert final tantrum].

per my curiosity, we stayed low instead of going ridge direct from the notch back to the first gully. route-finding/rollercoaster-ing our way through the talus was not worth it for me and i wish we had gone back up to the ridge, but thanks again to David for being agreeable— especially when he knew better!

[descend first gully, cross boulder field, road walk back to parking spot, the end]

final thoughts:

i was shocked by the poor rock quality on this route. once the holds started wobbling and breaking off in my hands, i became hyper-fixated on testing everything before committing to anything. call me conservative, but i struggle to tolerate wiggle room on exposed routes regardless of the technical quality. there is also most certainly a discrepancy in where my hands reached versus where someone 10" taller than me would reach, but this was the first mountain i have ever been on that felt like it was actively crumbling beneath me.

i have never been in The Hourglass on Little Bear so i can’t provide any sort of comparison between the two routes, but i have heard/read that the Class 3 climbing on solid rock is great (minus the natural, human-caused, or animal-triggered rocks flying down).
would i go back? yes. it might not be my favorite, but it is an option for people who either have a higher tolerance than me for bad rock, are better technical climbers, or maybe it's just as simple as being taller than 5’4”. i know everyone loves signs on trails- should you be at least X tall to climb this route? maybe.

anyway, super mega thanks to daway08 for the effort that is going into this route— i’m hopeful we’ve freed most of the rockfall and bad holds for the next party! disclaimer: some rocks were harmed in the making of this TR, but also some were gently placed aside.

happy trails!!