North Maroon

Mountains: North maroon
Dates: June 3, 2007
Crew: Frank, Jordan, Brittany
Routes climbed: Couloir to climbers right of North face
Routes skied: North Face

Well after lunch on Saturday afternoon we agreed that we would meet at the Maroon Bells parking lot around 2am on Sunday morning. As I am in aspen for the summer, I opted to sleep in a bed and then meet them. Well everyone knows how it goes with turning the alarm clock off and forgetting about it. So when the 1:15am alarm went off I kinda remember turning it off, but not really. Anyway as luck would have it I awoke around 3:18am. Oh…crap I thought as I jumped out of bed. Hmmm….should I go…not go…alright I’m going. I grab my breakfast (Starbucks double esspresso shots and pop tarts) and jump into my clothes all within about 4 minutes and I’m out the door. Taking it easy driving out of Aspen and as soon as I hit the Maroon Creek road it’s on like the Pikes peak road race. I might have tested the limits of the subaru outback’s cornering capabilities. Anyway I was on the trail and hiking by 3:49 am. (31 min from the time i got out of bed…not bad).

So I’ve got my skis, boots, crampons, two ice axes, skins (didnt use em), food 5 litres of water (All gone before the end of the day), and some other misc stuff in my pack…I start out at a jog knowing that Frank and Brittany are already up the hill…a long way (later found out they left their car at 2:30am). So I’m jogging along the little tourist path that might as well be a sidewalk until I hit the turn off for the crater lake trail. Well this whole time I’ve had Linkin Park’s new cd pumping in my ears (maybe a little motivation), and I start chugging up the trail as fast as I can. I have to stop every once in a while to let my heart calm down a little because it is absolutely pounding. Anyway, I reach trail turnoff at Crater lake about 20 min after leaving the car (I think it took longer to walk down it in the afternoon). Wow, holy sweatdrip…ok lose a layer and I’m off up the relentless uphill headed towards my goal. I’ve been walking for a little while and at one point I stop for a breather and look down to see a cairn next to me. Well that was blind luck i thought, as it was the turnoff for the creek crossing. I headed down the less evident climbers trail and about the time I reached the creek I saw a flicker of some headlamps climbing the final headwall just below treeline.
Sweet! I thought, I might have a chance of catching them! So back to super motivation and self butt kicking up the mountain, I continued as fast as I could. This all after getting one foot soaked crossing the creek, but I probably still saved some time. After crossing the creek I turned around to see daylight starting to break.

I continued up and found the climbers trail…or at least the cairns through the talus and after a couple of failed attempts at some snow in a couple of rotten chutes, and changing into my ski boots, I found a couloir leading up through the headwall that contained solid snow, and in the end it lead me right to the base of where I needed to be. I crested over the head wall and was super excited to see that I had made up some more ground (later found out that their route up the headwall had been nasty and slow) and that they were only about a quarter mile ahead now.

I’m pretty sure they saw me and Frank had reached the point where he was ready to switch over to Ice axe and crampons so I caught up to where he and Brittany had stopped, around 12000 ft. “So did your alarm not go off or something?” Frank asked. “Oh I think it did, but I think I remember turning it off and not getting up.” Frank didn’t seem super happy about the situation, but he was nice about it, and after tossing me the rope (we never used it or our harnesses), he started up the chute that leads to miners ski jump.

I switched into crampons as quickly as possible and pulled out the axes and was on my way. Brittany had gone ahead as well, so I followed in her steps for a while, but something she and I are always joking about is that she is 5’2″ and I am 6’4″, so our steps really just arent that compatible. I found Franks steps and followed until I caught up to him.

The plan was for me to be out in front and to set up any needed rope work, so I took the lead. We had just entered the couloir, when Mbsc decided she wasn’t going to head up any farther, and instead was just going to ski down the basin below to wait. (we were probably 200 ft above the flats) So after making sure she was ok to go down by herself we headed up the couloir and made good time doing so.

We topped out on the ridge rather quickly and found some cairns leading us towards the summit. Since we still had crampons and ice axes out, and because no one really likes rock climbing in ski boots, we opted for a snowfield to climbers right of the ridgeline and headed up that way instead.

Mugshot:

At one point we finally reached a knotch where we took off out crampons and had to settle for some skiboot rockclimbing.

After a short bit of rock climbing and some soft snow steps kicked in the snow we found ourselves on the final summit ridge.

A couple minutes later we were standing on top of North Maroon peak around 8:50 am. Making for a summit time of 5 hrs. We took some scenic shots:

After which we were ready to ski around 9:15 am.

We traversed down and off of the summit, and after making an attempt to downclimb one cliff band (instead of the punk rock band) unnsuccessfully, we put the skis back on and traversed to the summer rock band and downclimbed it after doing some ski passing down.

We immediatly put our skis back on (although it has been almost 45 min since we left the summit) and continued to follow Pete Sowar and Chris Websters tracks down through the cliff bands.

We had lots of pictures of our ski route on the way down, but being able to follow last weekends tracks was very helpful. We skied across and traversed to our first chute and then traversed to another and down…