Maroon Peak & N. Maroon Peak 7/15/10

Long day on the Bells

I may do a TR for this one but here's the skinny: We started from the overnight parking lot at 2:30 am. Though we had some trouble locating the entrance to the Bell Cord in the dark, we eventually found it and started climbing! A fairly straightforward and fun snow climb put us on the saddle between Maroon and N. Maroon. We climbed up to the summit of Maroon, ignoring the route as the rock was much more stable than anticipated. Then we tackled the traverse to North Maroon. Here I had some trouble on the last obstacle but survived thanks to my awesome partner. From North Maroon we descended the standard NE ridge route. I believe we ended up on the "old" route at some point (possibly when we crossed the rock glacier) and suffered some horrible scree and bushwhacking along the trail to Maroon Lake. Our round-trip time, at 16:45, was the longest in my brief mountaineering career.

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