Trip Report:

 

Mark and I packed into Crater Lake Thursday afternoon between intermittent rain showers.  After much back-tracking and looking around we found the only available campsite, #2, at Crater Lake, and claimed it as our own, even though it's not an ideal site.  It seems all the ground there has a bit of a slope to it and it sits in a flood plain that gets fed by runoff from the slopes above.  Nate arrived later that evening and our trio was complete.

 

We left camp at 4:20AM the next morning and followed the muddy Maroon Creek Trail for about 1.8 miles to the "twisted tree turnoff".  From here we knew the route to the ridge was going to be miserable, as it climbs 2,800 feet in about a mile.  Switchbacks apparently aren't welcome in the Maroon Bells Snowmass Wilderness, and for the most part the trail goes right up the fall line of the slope... MISERABLE.  Everything was loose and muddy as expected, with a few sections requiring "four wheel drive" to get up (read: dirty hands).  We all agreed that we had better get up S. Maroon today because we weren't ever going up this route again.

 

 

A little before 8AM we reached the south ridge at 13,300 ft and got to preview our remaining route on the peak.  It's only class 3 scrambling from here, though the ledges were all still wet from previous night's rain.  Regardless, the scrambling was straightforward, and the route finding pretty manageable too.

 

 

At 9:20AM we topped out on S. Maroon and evaluated the weather.  It looked favorable for the traverse, and nobody was too keen on descending the heinous slope down from the south ridge.  The traverse looks pretty intimidating from here, but thanks to some great reports from Joey L. and James J., we knew what we were in for.  After a few pictures and a round of ClifShots we began down climbing the loose slabs to the Bell Cord saddle.

 

Summit of South Maroon

 

Reaching the top of the notch above the Bell Cord was a bit of an eye opener.  The route straight down to the saddle seemed doable at first, but the last 15-20 feet weren't visible.  Not wanting to venture into the unknown we looked around and found a trail that bypasses the cliffs on the ridges west side.  Gaining this trail took a bit of back tracking and up climbing.  It turned out to be a good decision to backtrack around the difficulty as the bottom of the notch was pretty intimidating (overhung, featureless, etc).

 

Getting out of the Bell Cord saddle took some attention, I think it's considered Crux #1.  We trended to the west, left, side of the ridge and found some reasonable moves on solid rock.

 

Miscellaneous cruxy climbing shots

 

Beyond this the our route wound around (I think on the west side again) until we reached Crux #2.  This one looked fairly gnarly from below, but eventually I tackled it head on.  I thought the climbing approached fifth class, and certainly qualified as "no fall" terrain.  Based on these factors, once I reached the top I pulled out the rope I had carried, anchored in, and belayed Nate and Mark up.  They both climbed it without pause, but using the rope seemed prudent since we had it.

 

Crux #2

Immediately beyond Crux #2 the route has a "sidewalk in the sky" feel to it, and soon we were looking at the notch that can be jumped across.  We all down climbed a little ways, then hopped to the far side.

 

Leap of faith near the end of the traverse

 

The third crux requires some attention, but didn't warrant a belay.  This was by far the easiest of the three, though catching my ice axe on the overhanging rock proved frustrating.

 

Crux #3 (if you can call it a crux)

 

At 11:37 AM we reached the summit of North Maroon, with no small amount of relief.  To add to the relief, we met Amos and Lee on top, two climbers we had met earlier on Capitol.  They had just come up the NE ridge, and were happy to let us accompany them down. This would save us the headache of route finding on unfamiliar terrain.

 

Summit of North Maroon

 

The route down the NE ridge can't be much better than our route up S. Maroon.  Loose rocks abound, so we took our time to avoid triggering rockfall.

 

The class 4 dihedral appeared pretty quickly, and because I had my 30m rope handy we opted to rappel it.  This probably wouldn't be bad to down climb, but we had the rope and the weather window to accommodate the extra time required to rope up.

 

Mark and Nate on rappel

 

The route below the dihedral seemed to go on forever.  I think I saw enough loose rock to last a lifetime.  The only moment of real excitement was a brief bout of rock fall triggered by a mountain goat high on the route.  We heard the rocks bouncing down the second gully with plenty of notice to hide below a cliff.   In reality the rocks were large enough to warrant a change of underwear but came nowhere close to our party.  Regardless, this was one source of rock fall we hadn't considered!

 

The Widow Maker

 

The route down

 

The only other part of the descent worth mentioning occurred on some fairly benign, but steep terrain near Minnehaha Creek.  I was picking my way down some muddy trail when my feet blew and I started sliding towards some chest deep willows.  I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of extracting myself from the blasted willows, so I was both surprised and relieved when I abruptly stopped sliding just above the willows.  "What the..."  I looked around and found Nate grinning and holding me up by the ice axe on my pack.  There are advantages to having a climbing partner who outweighs you by 50 lbs.  At least the ice axe got used for something after carrying it all those miles.