I already had a bad feeling about this mountain, even before the thunderstorm struck and coated the slopes with a treacherous layer of hailstones. I emerged from my tent beside Lake Como and surveyed the 14,037-foot summit with a grim eye. There was nothing little about Little Bear Peak. It was grey, formidable, and the easiest way to the top was described as possibly the most difficult standard Fourteener route out of the 53 highest peaks in the Rockies. And that’s without the extra ice.
At least my immediate surroundings were more pleasant. My tent was pitched beside a decrepit log cabin with a collapsed roof – one of the few distinguishable remains of the gold mining town of Commodore. I’d arrived with my backpack yesterday and was immediately greeted by the natives, who were all interested in the food I’d hauled up from the valley floor. A ground squirrel hopped into my pack cover and discovered the peach hidden there. I chose to wash it off and finish what was left. Clark’s Nutcrackers flew in and chased away a curious chipmunk, but they couldn’t figure out to get into my food bag once I hung it on a line between the cabin walls.
The lord of the manor was a chubby, golden-haired marmot, who perched on a rock at the edge of the lake with its paws forward, like a sphinx. His demeanor was that of a muttonchopped aristocrat, in full command of his surroundings. I’d rested yesterday against a log, reading a book, and a pair of ground squirrels leapt over my legs during the middle stretch of an energetic chase sequence. But the marmot was unperturbed.
Perhaps I should have postponed my expedition to Little Bear until the mountain had time to thaw a little. However, at 6am I found myself catching up to three other hikers on the lower slopes of the mountain. Everyone else was wearing durable rock-climbing helmets to protect themselves from falling stones. I wore a knitted green beanie I’d found on the slopes of Galdhølpiggen in Norway last summer. Who needs to worry when you’re protected by yarn?
A Colorado native named Steve and I quickly outpaced the only other two hikers, and I set my hiking poles aside as we finally came face-to-face with the crux of the journey: the Hourglass. It was a steep, hourglass-shaped gully that funneled every rock loosened above it into a channel ten feet wide. Instead of grains of sand tumbling down, this hourglass had boulders the size of your head. There was nowhere to hide in the narrows, and any attempt to dodge these projectiles would probably cause us to lose our grip and plummet a couple hundred feet.
Obviously, I was anxious to get the narrow section behind us. A waterfall poured through the constriction in the Hourglass, thanks to last night’s rainfall and the melting ice near the summit. But thankfully, someone had left a pair of ropes behind, which allowed us to haul our bodies up the slippery slope. My fingers were numb by the end, but I was happy, thinking the worst was over.
Then we got in trouble. The Hourglass opened up, but there were no good routes to the summit. The terrain was what mountain climbers designate as Class Four, which is a rating just below technical rock climbing, when ropes, anchors and harnesses are utilized. My interpretation is that if you slip on Class Four terrain, there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll die. I think I could have handled normal Class Four territory, but this morning every level surface in the Hourgalss was either wet or coated with an icy glaze of congealed hailstones and frozen rain. It was bad.
I led the way up a ravine that quickly grew steeper and narrower. And it didn’t help that many of the potential handholds were loose. I straddled the ravine and continued to climb, though my legs started shaking and my mind became consumed with an awful, nightmarish sensation… the feeling of knowing that the higher you go, the greater the likelihood of your death. You dread the future moment when you realize that you have to back down… and backing down could easily kill you. When descending a slope this steep, it’s too difficult to see every foothold, and all too easy to slip.
I took another step upwards, and then I could go no further. My guts were twisting in knots, and a surge of panic was either going to push me towards reckless movement or complete paralysis. While I searched frantically for an exit, Steve forged ahead and pulled himself over a rock shelf. I performed an equally dubious maneuver to my left, escaping the ravine using untrustworthy handholds, and then I forced myself to sit on a wet rock until my legs stopped quivering.
For the next half-hour, I managed to keep myself from rolling down the Hourglass by searching out Class 3 terrain and avoiding all Class 4 areas unless I had no choice. And with an intense rush of relief, at last I joined Steve upon the summit crag and reached for the camera on my belt to commemorate my continued existence. But it wasn’t there. My camera case had fallen off my belt somewhere within the Hourglass!
So the descent turned into an unpromising search for a lost $350 camera. I would have preferred to concentrate solely on staying alive, especially after I belatedly examined my shoes and noticed that the tread was almost completely gone. No wonder I wasn’t getting much traction on these slippery slopes!
I also had to struggle to avoid knocking rocks loose from the slopes above the narrows. They quickly picked up speed, and a careless move could mean someone’s death below. It was a huge burden of responsibility. The one major rock I accidentally loosened shattered against the wall of the Hourglass like a bullet against a brick building. Luckily, it passed over the heads of the other two hikers, who were slowly using technical rock climbing gear to negotiate the Hourglass. They were smart people.
And then, against all odds and to Steve’s disbelief, I found my camera! The case had fallen thirty feet into a crevice while I was escaping from the ravine and too shaken up to notice. We descended the waterfall, overcoming the last remaining obstacle in the Hourglass, and I felt utterly triumphant. I had possession of both my life and my property after everything that had happened. All I had left to retrieve were my fiberglass hiking poles…
And the poles, of course, were in the process of being devoured by a pack of five hungry marmots. I witnessed the vandalization-in-process and had to give chase to one of the furry rodents who was trying to escape to its burrow with a pole clutched between its teeth. Though the marmots had made swiss cheese out of the rubber handles, my outrage was rather muted. Even when one of my hiking poles snapped in half five minutes from my campsite, I was able to hold up the two broken ends and laugh. It didn’t really matter. I was alive, uninjured, and immensely thankful that there were 52 other mountains in Colorado easier than this one.

Bryan is a 1991 Norwich High School graduate and works as a naturalist at the Rancho Alegre Outdoor School in Santa Barbara, CA. You may reach him mid-journey at foolsby@hotmail.com.