Maroon Peak East Face Descent

Peak: Maroon Peak
Date: 5/26/08
Route: Ascended Y couloirs, Descended east face
RT data: 4600 vertical, Mileage 8
Partners in crime: Andy Dimmen, Tyler Christoff, Jordan White

After toying with what we would like to do for Saturday this weekend, we finally landed on the East Face of Maroon. Going up there, we really had no idea exactly what we were going to be skiing on that side, just that we would eventually end up at crater lake. I had talked to Lou earlier in the week and he’d mentioned that he and some others were going to be on Maroon as well. After an hour of sleep in Basalt we drove up to the TH to meet Andy who was asleep in his trunk…his car has a REALLY big trunk. We left the TH with trail shoes on at 2 am. We made great time as the snow was totally frozen from where we first hit it in the trees below Crater lake. We walked until it was time to start angling up to the garbage dump and switched shoes for boots and spikes soon after. We made our way up the low angle slope and took the left passage through the cliff band known as the garbage chute.
This short section was entirely choked with basketball sized roller ball wet debris. Well…that should be fun on the way down. We continued booting up and watched as group after group of headlamps came up and went in their different directions. We watched the sun come up from 12,500 feet, and what an amazing scene that is from up there. We kept looking down and seeing others below us on the face and figured one of them was Lou and Louie. We continued up and crested the top of the right couloir at 13,700.
At this point we crossed around the back side and joined up with the summer route to the summit, this involved some fun climbing and we topped out somewhere between 745 and 8 am.
The snow was still pretty frozen and not quite ready to ski, and we opted to wait a while and ended up waiting for the other groups. Lou Dawson came up the route we did coming up from the bell cord was Neil Beidelman, who was a real pleasure to meet and talk to. Among the crowd were the three of us, Neil, Lou, Louie, Bob Perlmutter, and as bad as I feel I can’t for the life of me remember the one other guys name. We looked across to North Maroon where Ted Mahon and Christy Sauer had just topped out with Dirk. Popular peaks today we all thought.
At this point it was getting warm on the face and we decided to go our separate ways, the six not in our group did a dropping skiing traversed down to the Bell Cord and skied that way. This left Andy, Tyler and myself up there looking down the east face ready to go down what we realized later to be the ‘dav route.”
Well, now or never and I dropped in to some VERY steep turns and waited out of the way as Tyler and Andy did the same. For the first few hundred feet the skiing was at a minimum in the Mid 50 degree range, but the snow was great for landing jumpturns down the face. We snaked our way in and out of the cliff bands, skiing one at a time until we ended up at the base of the Y couloirs, and from here it was a reasonable ski out, minus the garbage dump of basketballs that is. But I will say that to date this is the steepest thing I‘ve skied.

Well enough reading you want to see pictures:

Going Up: