Backpacking Maroon Bells

Panorama

Trip Data

  • Pho­tos: Photo gal­lery
  • Route & GPX: Strava
  • Hikers: The Lake Be­low Team - me, Todd, Bill, Rob
  • Loc­a­tion: Col­or­ado’s Ma­roon Bells - Snow­mass Wil­der­ness
  • Trail­head: Ma­roon Snow­mass Trail­head #1975
  • Mileage: 48 miles
  • As­cent: 9000 feet (4 passes)
  • El­ev­a­tion: 8500 - 12500 ft
  • Date: 27 Sep 2022+
  • Dur­a­tion: 6 days
  • Weath­er: 30s-60s
  • Con­di­tions: Everything - rain every day, snow, dry, mud

Journal

A few stor­ies from this trip…

Finally

Our first time hik­ing to­geth­er since pre-Cov­id. Man, I missed the West. And my friends.

Fuel, Schmuel

We al­most star­ted hik­ing without fuel. It didn’t quite make the check­list. For­tu­nately, Bill and/or Todd real­ized in the even­ing be­fore our start the next morn­ing that we had no stove fuel. They called every store in As­pen that might have some - every­one was already closed. Bill man­aged to track down a store new Glen­wood Springs - 45 minutes away (one way) who gra­ciously sold him two fuel con­tain­ers over the phone and left them hid­den out­side, where Bill and Todd picked them up later that night.

Access

If you read all the on­line ma­ter­i­al about hik­ing in Ma­roon Bells, what you learn is that, while you do not need a hik­ing re­ser­va­tion, you do have to take a bus in­to the Wil­der­ness. And you do need a re­ser­va­tion for that. And the busses are very full, so you have to re­serve far in ad­vance… or else you might find your­self a day or two late get­ting in­to the wil­der­ness. So I had ar­ranged re­ser­va­tions for us many months be­fore the trip for the 8am bus.

Ex­cept I could not quite fig­ure out how the bus was go­ing to get us to our re­mote trail­head.

At 7:45 that morn­ing, in line, after we had worked our way to the place where you leave your car and get on the bus with a bunch of day hik­ing tour­ists, we fi­nally learned from the nice bus re­ser­va­tion lady that nooooooo, you can’t take the bus to our trail­head. For us to get to where we wanted to start hik­ing, we had to drive. And we could leave our vehicle there at the trail­head. And we could have gone at any time dur­ing the day.

Sigh.

So we did that.

The web­sites still say you have to have a bus re­ser­va­tion to hike from there. But no, you only need a bus if you start at Ma­roon Lake. Which we’d nev­er do.

Elevation

Four huge passes. Amaz­ing views. Alti­tudes ran­ging from 9000 feet to 11,500 feet. All of us felt it. The crazy col­or­ful dreams at night. The in­ab­il­ity to breathe enough in the last 500 feet of a climb. Im­pact on speed. It’s a thing.

Dirty

These trails and these camp­sites were the dirti­est we’ve seen in a na­tion­al wil­der­ness. We’re tak­ing poor toi­let pa­per hy­geine. C’mon Col­or­ado… build pit toi­lets in the really pop­u­lar camp­ing areas, and get a little more ag­gress­ive with all those mor­ons des­troy­ing the sanc­tity of the wil­der­ness. We saw dozens of hikers, a hand­ful of trail­run­ners, a horse train, and zero rangers.

Offtrail

We only man­aged to head offtrail for a few miles, but it was oh so worth it. Next time - few­er trails, more bush­whack­ing.

Tarp vs. Tent

It rained on us ba­sic­ally every night. So we had the tarp up every night. Some­times it was a win, let­ting us sleep where we couldn’t have put a tent. Some­times it was a huge amount of ef­fort for Bill and Rob, who are knot and tarp geni­uses, to get the thing up. I’m amazed at how well it worked in all that weath­er.

But we kept say­ing “y’know, a tent would just be easi­er”.

We’ll see where we end up for the next hike.

Overall

Ab­so­lutely gor­geous area. Would go back in a heart­beat. But… would go on trails less traveled.

The Route

The run­ning joke on this trip was that our planned route changed two or three times a day. And it really did.

We star­ted at the north end of Ma­roon Bells at the Ma­roon Snow­mass Trail­head #1975. Our ini­tial plan was to head south on the Ma­roon Snow­mass Trail to Snow­mass Lake, and then to loop clock­wise around Cap­it­ol Peak, pos­sibly go­ing offtrail over a ridge or two, and then to ar­rive back at the trail­head from the west.

Al­tern­at­ively, if we were mov­ing a little slower than we needed for that loop, we would in­stead go east from Snow­mass Lake, head over Buck­skin Pass, and then come back north on Ma­roon Creek trail, re­turn­ing to the trail­head from the east.

When we star­ted, we wer­en’t sure which one we were go­ing to do - much de­pended on the weath­er, our speed at the high el­ev­a­tion, and mood.

At camp on the first night, Rob and I tossed both op­tions out and sug­ges­ted that we in­stead do a loop around the fam­ous Four Passes route, and then to head out past Cap­it­ol, since it looked like we were mak­ing really good time. The next morn­ing, after most of the party had a really hor­rible night try­ing to sleep at 11,000 feet we con­firmed that plan, since it would get us in­to a lower evel­a­tion camp on night two.

So, on day two, we went east, over Buck­skin Pass, and then headed south, com­ing pretty close to the main park en­trance. We camped at Min­nehaha Gulch, which looked like a nice lake on the map, but was really a swampy mess in real­ity. And… that day was harder than we ex­pec­ted, mak­ing me again ques­tion our hik­ing plan…

Day three took us over Ma­roon and in­to the very high plat­eau be­low Fri­gid Air pass. That was our best camp­ing of the trip, ex­cept for the heavy rain, but again had me a little wor­ried about our plan due to our low mileage. Those passes were hard.

We headed over Fri­gid Air pass on day four. Where we ended up would de­term­ine our path out of the wil­der­ness. If we made good mileage, we’d head up past Little Gem Lake, off trail, in­to the basin west of Snow­mass Moun­tain. If we were slow, we’d stick with the four passes loop and head back out the way we came in.

It rained on us. And it was cold. And it was tough climb­ing. When we stopped to camp by the Crys­tal River, I knew we had to the take the short­er path out. So … we didn’t really know our route un­til the end of day four.

That night, it snowed on us. So we pro­ceeded slowly up and over Trail Rider Pass (in a snowy light­ning storm), then down through snow in­to the mud trails around Snow­mass Lake, even­tu­ally camp­ing in the brush along Snow­mass Creek. It rained on us all night, again…. so the next morn­ing, in­stead of go­ing offtrail in­to more snowy passes and stay­ing wet and cold, we elec­ted to head down­stream to the car, com­ing out of the wil­der­ness a day earli­er than we planned.