North Maroon Peak Ski

Peak: North Maroon Peak

Route: North Face (Climbed the Couloir and Ridge)

Partners: Scott B., Adimmen

Well after experiencing some nice stability lately around the state, and after having been egged on a bit by Frank, this was the day to go give North Maroon a go ( I skied a couple years ago in June with Frank Konsella). Andy was up to the task and newcomer ScottieB decided to give it a go.

Scott showed up to my house around 3 am and we hopped in my truck with the sled in tow. Lately I’ve grown accustomed to driving up and down Highway 82 in the middle of the night with no one around, gotta love not having the traffic!

We rolled up and found Andy awake but still in his sleeping bag. I unloaded the sled and got ready and before we knew it we were cruising up the frozen 8 miles of road to the upper parking lot. We arrived behind another group who left sometime before us (we would later find out that this was Matt Ross and crew).

We began the familiar flat skin across the Maroon Lake Valley to the trailcut that takes us towards crater Lake. Somewhere after the turn off I had to take care of some business so Scott and Andy continued on. A short time after I started walking again I found these two lumps in the middle of the trail:

We continued to follow the Buckskin pass trail cut on a climbing traverse until timberline where we would cross the creek and head towards our objective.

Andy being dwarfed:

We made the switch from skins to spikes and started our booter up the North Couloir.

Up the ridge:

Part way up the ridge during one of the times whe we taversed out on to the north face for a bit Scottie found himself suffering from lack of sleep and decided to call the climb quits for the day. He was in position to join one of our traverses as well as have a potentially good spot to shoot some photos from. Andy and I continued on to the summit which was an interesting experience. First off, I had forgotton to turn my phone off and started getting phone calls and texts. One was from Lou Dawson, and I figured that would be an approriate one to take. “You guys down yet?” “Na, snow is chalky, we didn’t hurry too much.” “Ok well we’ll see ya in a bit.”

Well I still didn’t remember to turn it off and mid jump turn down the face it rang again. I didn’t really feel like I could stop at the time to answer it so I kept skiing. Later that night i got the message and it was Lou again calling to tell me that he and Louie were watching us from the telescope at the top of Elk Camp over in snowmass.