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Peak(s):  Little Bear Peak  -  14,041 feet
Date Posted:  09/03/2014
Date Climbed:   08/31/2014
Author:  14er Fan
 Little Bear Peak - Standard: West Ridge and Southwest Face   

We climbed Little Bear Peak last Sunday via the West Ridge and Southwest Face route. It took us three hours with pretty heavy packs to get to Lake Como and spent the night there on Saturday. We had some cloud cover on the way up the road Saturday afternoon and met some great people, like you tend to do in the mountains. When we got to Lake Como to camp, there was no sign of Barney the Bear.

On Sunday morning, I woke up before our alarms went off. We decided to start hiking early to try to avoid the holiday weekend crowds. There were a ton of people at Lake Como and we made our way as quietly as possible around the lake to the turn off for the gully. There is a large cairn to help you find it, which was easy to see in the dark with our headlamps. We trudged up the scree field and made our way to the notch.

We had a hard time staying on the trail on the West Ridge in the dark, but we built the cairns back up on our way back down the mountain to help future hikers stay on trail. Once we found the trail, the route became much easier and is not particularly challenging. We made it to the hourglass, secured our helmets, uncoiled our rope, and started the ascent 1.5 hours after leaving Lake Como. There were two ropes coming through the hourglass and one of them extended well beyond the bottom of the hourglass. There was some running water on the hourglass, but it was not frozen when we climbed. We did not see any headlights in front of us, but did see a few groups coming up behind us. We decided to ascend the hourglass in the dark, which didn't make it that much more challenging than coming back down was during the day. We made it past the hourglass and started the rest of the hike to the summit. This section is extremely loose, but we were careful and didn't have any pebbles or rocks slide out more than a couple feet from under our boots. I was very nervous on the section above the hourglass as there are several sections that feel unstable. We made it to the summit at sunrise, snapped some pictures, and headed back down as quickly as we could.

We met a couple coming up to do the Little Bear/Blanca traverse just above the hourglass if the wind permitted. Thanks for being careful above us! We passed another group at the bottom of the hourglass and gave them our rope. We made it safely off the hourglass gully by 7:30 and decided to snack on the West Ridge. We passed a few more groups on our way down the mountain and safely made it back to Lake Como. We did meet someone at the notch who had climbed up the ridge instead of coming up the gully to the notch in the West Ridge from Lake Como. He said he had done the 'gully' route last summer and was snowed out. He didn't want to do it again and highly recommended following the ridge the whole way up from the road (starting lower than Lake Como to get there).

When we got back to the road, we spotted a mother deer and a baby deer in the stream between the road and gully. This is probably the highest that I have ever seen a deer. Cloud cover had moved over the summit of Little Bear when we made it back to camp.

It was our second try on Little Bear after turning around at the hourglass last summer. It feels really good to check it off!



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