Damn, what a trip! Stories of the Hourglass have stressed me out for years, resulting in me putting off this beast. I finally made a spur of the moment decision to attack a class 4 14er two days before the hike, and was planning on something in the Elks, but this time wildfires shut the plan down. I swear every time I try to go there something happens- last time a trailer full of pigs flipped over and shut down Glenwood Canyon for half a day. Anyways, I flipped the plan on a climbing buddy who was trying to get me to climb some ridges in the Gores and convinced him to do LB, but he was all in for the classic LB to Blanca traverse, a terrifying expert ridge, and more than I bargained for. I fully planned on backing down once we summited LB, bur entertained the thought for his sake. We made the slog to Lake Como late in the afternoon, and set up camp around 830 or 9pm. At 4 AM we woke up and went after it, moving surprisingly fast up the shit gully, across the first ridge and to the bottom of the glass. Much like the trough at Long’s Peak, the Hourglass is sketchy, but the main reason people get hurt here is because of rockfall from above, so when they say no more than one party at a time, they mean it. The surrounding ridges all funnel down into this narrow death trap, and twice I narrowly dodged rocks that could have taken me out- one looked like something from the matrix. Anyway, we made it to the summit ok, then decided to go for the traverse. Damn, talk about concentration. This mile-long bad boy demands all of it, along with a cool head, but luckily the holds are solid. It took us around 2:45 to cross it, and I really only had one scare, trying to put on and secure my backpack while moving and briefly lost my balance. Lesson learned. After summiting Blanca (#2 for me), the rest was history. Hands down my most technical route to date.

Other peaks climbed on this trip