Route climbed: Standard summer route up hour glass:
Route skied: Hour Glass to Baby Thunder
Crew: Frank and Myself

After being done with Blanca and Ellingwood the day before by 11 am, we had plenty of time to refuel and rest for our climb and ski of Little Bear. We left camp around 5:40 am and made quick time skinning across the lake and up to the base of the gully that leads to the route up little bear.
We had talked with another group that was bound for Little Bear the same day and decided we would leave first. Conservative Don is a member here and was part of the other group.
The climb up the gully was not difficult for the most part, although some of the snow was not entirely ready to support weight and we postholed every once in a while.

After topping out on the couloir we started the tedious traverse across the rocks and snow. Not a big deal in summer, but fairly annoying with ski boots on.

After coming around the corner a little bit we were both a little taken aback by what looked like a severe lack of snow up high. Frank like myself has already climbed the 14ers and is mostly in it for skiing them these days. So he felt a little less motivated, but hell…we were only 800 feet below the summit so we continued on.
After a while we finally reached continuous snow that had recieved an excellent freeze the night before and made for great cramponing across to the base of the hour glass.

I took the lead and kicked steps up into the hourglass:

I turned to the right at the top (the summer route goes left) because there appeared to be more snow here.

We continued on up the snow gully to climbers right and in no time we had topped out on our 3rd peak in 2 days.

Some scenics:

We waited for a few minutes for the group of 4 to get to the top before we skied (who likes ice chunks in the face).
Anyway we figured any thawing this frozen snow would do before we skied would be helpful.
So after topping out and exchanging conversation for a bit, they decided to downclimb to a point where they could watch as well as be out of the fall line. After they hit their stopping point we clicked in and it was time to ski.

Frank:

Myself:

We skied as far as we could across the ridge and then put our skis back on our back. We opted to climb closer to the ridge in hopes of an easier traverse. As we gained the ridgeline however I took a look down a deep gully that looked skiable except for the top 15 or so feet. The top of the chute looked like harder downclimbing than we were interested in, however we walked about 20 feet farther on the ridge and found an easier downclimb.

After the short downclimb we found a hanging snowfield that led to a steep drop in to the couloir:

From here we skied out to the Como Basin Below

Myself:

Frank:

Here is a far away look at our line off the top of little bear.

Here is a far away look at our line off the top of little bear.

Once the were back we headed down the trail and soon switched skis for hiking shoes (at least i did) and were on our way to the car.

We reached the car and enjoyed some some cold goodness (PBR) and spent a little extra time digging out part of a snowbank that was giving us difficulty getting back up. Soon enough we were on the road driving down the 4×4 road.
Here is Frank trying some extreme beer drinking on the como road:

Ended up being a great day, and these are three peaks that we are both happy to have checked off of our ski list