The next morning I broke camp and drove over Independence Pass (12,095’) toward Aspen and the Maroon Bells. Aye aye aye. If you're heading into Maroon Bells, do not use Aspen as your gateway. Get everything you need further out, including gas, almost a dollar a gallon higher in Aspen than in my last fill up. If you want to see Aspen, do it as a separate place entirely. It is wildly congested, parking is difficult and almost entirely metered. The late (and for a brief while great before a long, painful self-parody) Hunter S Thompson once ran for office in Aspen on a platform of tearing up all the roads and placing the parking lots outside of town. Boy did that go the other way. Lot of celebrities though. I saw four or five myself in the packed grocery store. I didn't know who any of them were, but they were definitely celebrities.
I had passed a half dozen campgrounds coming down from Independence Pass but I wanted to get closer to the thick of things. Only three small campgrounds grace the Maroon Creek Road, walk-in spots mostly, some requiring reservations. I got lucky and scored a site late Monday afternoon in a small, cramped campground and could only hope nobody snored. There were more campsites than parking spaces, so I also had to hope that civility would reign. The Forest Service was offering chicken wire to keep porcupines from chewing up the insides of our engines.
I pitched my tent and then drove to the end of the road and spent a pleasant Monday evening puttering around Maroon Lake, one of the legendary scenes of the Colorado Rockies. Maroon Peak (14,156 ft.) and North Maroon Peak (14,014 ft.) - the Maroon Bells - loom over the 9580‘ lake. Said to be the most photographed spot in the Colorado Rockies and that sounds right to me. The peaks are made of a reddish muddy sedimentary rock but are typically depicted under light snow cover, as the snow forms linear patterns on the stacked sedimentary layers. Late fall colors do wonders with the surrounding aspen forest as well. None of that for me though. I had a mostly overcast summer sky so had to go for a more demure scene. I did have some dramatic storm clouds for compensation, and lighting was better away from the Bells. The jagged maroon pinnacles of Sievers Mountain over lush green meadows were particularly great.
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| Maroon Bells |
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| Maroon Lake |
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| Sievers Mountain South |
I ate at a picnic area and didn't come back to the campground until 7:30. All the parking spaces were taken so I squeezed my Yaris in behind the dumpster. All the chicken wire was gone. A neighbor told me a guy had come in with a pop-up camper and more or less demanded one of the already-taken parking spots. He went unsatisfied. I crawled into my tent even though it was still light; the CG was just too cramped for me to sit comfortably outside. Right away a storm broke, lot of wind, lot of lightning but very little thunder or rain. Still, it drove everyone into their tents and there they mostly stayed. The night went well. I got up for a midnight snack and came face to face with what I believed was an unflappable porcupine but what the morning light revealed to be a piece of wood.
At 5:00 AM I drove back to the day-use area for breakfast; the bathroom had soap and water though the toilet was still pit. Sunrise on the Maroon Bells was beautiful but rather than go crazy taking pictures I prepared for my hike.
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| Maroon Bells |
Buckskin Pass
The trail to Buckskin Pass began with a quarter-circle of Maroon Lake and then climbed gradually to Crater Lake, providing a steady slow motion view of the Maroon Bells. Pyramid Peak (14,018 ft.) was somewhere in my picture but I wasn't quite sure where. After a brief respite through some woods, the views opened up for a much steeper ascent through meadows. The early gentleness of trail forces an increased grade to make up the distance, and the trail climbs 2,340 in 2.8 miles from Crater Lake to Buckskin Pass.
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| Maroon Bells |
An anomalous cornice provided a formidable barrier to the pass and a striking contrast to the flowery green meadow and deep blue sky. From the pass the views shot out to the spectacular Snowmass Peak (14,092 ft.) rising above Snowmass Lake. It looked like a backpacking paradise, and is said to be one of the most crowded wilderness areas in Colorado. I didn't see a soul the whole way up, but I did chat with two nice young women at the pass. They were doing a 4-pass, 3-night loop. On the way down I came upon a crowd of young kids in backpacks having a real hard time bagging the pass.
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| Snowmass Peak |
Electric Pass
I woke up the next morning at 5:00 AM feeling rested. How I wish I could train myself to do that all the time. I ate breakfast at my car by the dumpster and made coffee on an empty table (reserved for the guy in the pop-up camper, who I never laid eyes on) and drove out to the trailhead for Electric Pass. The road was paved all the way until the 3/4-mile spur into the trailhead, and that was absolutely atrocious.
This was yet another outstanding hike. My notes call it the most alpine so far, but my notes seem to say that a lot. Skies began as a combination of blue and gray and gradually became mostly stormy with shafts of occasional sunlight breaking through for drama. The basin above timberline really was phenomenal. Cathedral Lake (11,866) sits above timberline tucked beneath Cathedral Peak (13,943) - “a rugged volcanic extrusion..,flanked by a series of sharp pinnacles“ that form an extensive amphitheater, enclosing a terrific rock glacier and yet another brilliant flowery meadow. Just beyond and seemingly above Cathedral Peak loomed a depth of several peaks hovering in the thickening cloud cover.
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| Cathedral Lake |
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| Cathedral Peak |
The weather became more precarious the closer I came to the pass, not the most desirable of circumstances. I was approaching Electric Pass, after all, at 13,500’ the highest named pass in Colorado. David Day, author of a terrific hiking guide, says you can spot at least 5-fourteeners from the pass, but not in this weather. Anyway, when you’re at 13,5000, 14,000 isn't necessarily transfixing, particularly given the power of the nearby scenery.
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Clouds were coming in from all directions and it was getting increasingly dark, but for some reason the air didn't feel stormy, though I knew I was a long way from an expert on Rocky Mountain climatology. Three old guys arrived at the pass and immediately turned around and headed back so I figured I should do the same. That's how they got old, right? Meanwhile one badly under dressed woman marched up to the pass and continued on up the adjacent ridge. She came down a bit later and announced it was all clear after the next wave. Nothing else she said made much sense though, so I wasn't sure I could count on her weather forecasting. Two more guys came up and they too went straight up the ridge. I just stood at the pass, mesmerized by the cloud show. I had never seen anything like it. I didn't feel in danger but I didn't feel like climbing the ridge either. In fact I eventually felt satiated and began hiking back.
On the way back I passed quite a few people heading up, including many children and one mother with two children in tow and a baby on her back, soldiering on into some stormy-looking skies. While some people do get up early like I'd been doing, more so than any place else I've ever hiked, the great majority still head out mid-morning just like they do anywhere else. The weather forecast for the Colorado Rockies is pretty much the same every day - sunny and clear in the morning with building clouds and a 30-40% chance of thunderstorms after noon. Pretty little white clouds start appearing around 10:00 AM, and these consistently gain mass so that by noon or so it does always look like rain. The thinking, I suppose, is that it always might rain and storm but probably won't do it on us, which seems to be an accurate assessment. Except for when it does...I caught a pleasant shower in the aspen grove on the very last stretch of trail and it poured like crazy when I got back to the campground.
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