Day 7 - Little Bear, Blanca, Lindsey, Ellingwood

Hopefully this is the hardest day of the trip. I was moving for about 19 hours, and had to pull off a couple of surprise 5th class moves that made me nearly poop my pants.

I woke up at 2am, packed up most of my camp, but left my shelter incase I wanted to come back and crash out. I was trying to hang my food from a branch that had a strand of rope in it that someone had hung food with but then couldn’t retrieve. I tried to pull it out but it was stuck. While tossing my string over, the carabiner got caught on some other branches and when I pulled it to retrieve it and try again, it whipped around the branch and then the gate clipped the string. I couldn’t believe it. That rope was very stuck. I was able to improvise the two tree method.

But ultimately knew that that string wasn’t coming home with me. My next bear bag hanging string would have a locking carabiner to prevent this. So that was a charmed start to the day.

The climb up to Little Bear was pretty straightforward. I was the first person up there. The hourglass, the 4th class section right before the summit was surprisingly chill in my opinion, and would be one of the more lowkey parts of the day.

I got started on the Little Bear to Blanca traverse before the sun came up. The route finding on the traverse was pretty straightforward. Most of the stress was located in the first 100 feet, coming off of Little Bear. After a couple of hours the exposure cracked me pretty good and I was just generally stressed.

Little Bear under the moon.

The traverse.

The catwalk.

When I got to Blanca, I realized that the traverse over to Lindsey was going to be much harder than I had thought. The terrain had a lot more variability than the topo let on. And the down climb onto the apron into the basin behind Blanca was a lot steeper at the top than I had realized.

After getting through the down climb I was worried that reversing that was going to be hard - which is a bad feeling. And I couldn’t shake it the rest of the time. But since I had to do it one way or another I decided to continue on to Lindsey and deal with that when I came back.

I saw some bighorn sheep, which was pretty cool. The walk across the basin was a lot of up and down on loose scree. Several times on the way across I thought about just getting to Lindsey, hiking out that side and trying to find a ride home to quit. It sucked. Eventually I made it across and had a more enjoyable time on the proper Lindsey route.

The sheep.

After summiting, on the way back to Blanca, a guy offered me a ride around to the Blanca road if I wanted to bail. I declined, but knew I’d be pretty mad at myself if I got hurt later and had had this way out. On the way back it started thunder storming and hailing, and I hid under a big boulder for a minute to wait it out. Now the rock was wet, all the better for the climb back up the apron.

From the bottom of the apron I could see a better route up than the one I’d taken down, so I started up that. It was light 4th class until I got up to this set of sloping ledges that I had to pull a few 5th class moves on. Luckily they had dried out by then because I was essentially slab climbing. Part of the way up those ledges I found an old piton. That gave me confidence that I was on a route, but also spooked me that others had protected it.

Pulling over the top was a huge relief. I put on Ski and Party by Pixie and the Partygrass Boys and did a little dance.

When I came back to the top of Blanca I was surprised to see two more folks up there, Ron and his son Mattias. It was their first 14er, even though Ron grew up on a ranch that you could nearly see from the top of Blanca. I had a really nice chat with them. They had a great energy, and I felt less stressed and cracked out by the time we started going down. I’d nearly forgotten that I still had to climb Ellingwood Point, so I traversed over there and then headed down.

The hike back to Lake Como was gorgeous but never ending. I packed up camp and headed down the road back to my bike. There I had some skittles, a protein shake, and 650ml of water as my dinner after a 19 hour day and then tried to go to sleep. I had to wait until the wind backed off to really knock out for the night.

The hike back to camp.

I hope no other day on this trip is like that.