
| If you choose to take the Bear’s Hump route AND you choose not to traverse around the cockscomb ridge, then everything you read about this scramble is true. It is a difficult scramble involving exposure, several challenging moves, and routefinding. With each pinnacle on the ridge, we had to decide whether to climb over it with the inevitable downclimbing on the other side or to downclimb to our right and gain up with the ridge after the pinnacle in question. Either way involved vertical downclimbing to some extent. Once you are on the ridge, you are committed to the route. Without a rope, it would be very difficult and dangerous to try to backtrack and downclimb off of the ridge. For a little extra excitement to our day, we had one section of straddling the ridge au cheval, some postholing after the ridge (luckily not too much), and some bushwhacking on our decent. The views throughout the day are amazing as you overlook Upper Waterton Lake and a myriad of peaks in both Waterton and Glacier National Parks. We even saw a Bighorn ewe with a very young lamb near the summit. It was an exciting and challenging first summit of the year! |