This post is way past due, so I’ll keep it to a shorter recap with some pretty pictures.
My friend Eric and I decided that we wanted to go on an adventure. Eric had climbed Little Bear before, a 14,000 something foot peak in the Sangre De Cristos. We had heard about the amazing ridge traverse from Little Bear to Blanca to Ellington, hitting up three fourteeners in a day.
Eric has a 4×4 Tacoma. We did not take his Tacoma. We took the Ponty because hey, what’s an adventure without Ponty?
We were hoping to arrive the day before and hike up to Lake Como and camp at the base of the climb to Little Bear. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t looking great to make it a two day outing, so we decided to do it all in a day. Also unfortunate was the fact that we took Ponty instead of Eric’s truck and we had to park at around 7,000′ elevation and hike up the 4WD road for miles.
So we woke up at 6:00am and hiked the road in the dark. At a solid “I hike for a living” pace, we made it up to Lake Como by 9:00am. The trail up to Little Bear was steep; a sketchy scramble at times with several fixed lines to help up the more intense sections. We made it up to the top by noon which is what we were shooting for.
Then we set out to climb the ridge from Little Bear to Blanca. There’s no way to properly explain this traverse without gross overuse of the word EXPOSURE. Here’s a link to another blog where someone was able to take a lot more pictures and explain more.
http://www.summitpost.org/little-bear-blanca-traverse/335966
They say in their blog “In my humble opinion you need immaculate weather, proper preparation, oodles of confidence and concentration when you embark on this traverse. The most difficult climbing on the ridge is no more than Class 4/low 5th (provided you stay right on the crest, if you climb down in search of ledges, you are hosed) but the exposure is significant on both sides for much of the ridge.
Eric has climbed lots of mountains before, but his confidence under the circumstances (exposure) slowed us down. Oh, and that part about climbing down to search for ledges and getting hosed? Yeah, we did that. We traversed the crux of the ridge and about half way across we came to a headwall that looked impassable (later to find out there was a gully around the back right of it), we skirted down off the ridge to the point where there was no getting back up… An off trail scramble was our only way down.
The decent was scary and took a quite a long time. Eventually we made it back down to Lake Como and hiked back down that long miserable road back to Ponty, wishing we had taken Eric’s truck. In the end we hiked for about 16 hours, covered about 18 miles and climbed up and down about 7,000′ feet of elevation. We learned some valuable lessons about life, risk, teamwork, and about trusting someone else’s assessment of “it’s easy”.
Under the circumstances, we were more than happy to accept defeat. But something tells me I’ll be back to take another stab at that ridge.
On our way back we stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park to spend a day at the beach… in the desert…
Pont-X Adventures 