Ali and I booked a campsite at Silver Bells, which is the first campsite past the ranger station. It's a pretty nice location with the river right beside you and allows easy access both to hiking and to Aspen if you need any supplies (beer). The sites were kinda close to one another so you don't get as much privacy as you would at other locations but it was also nice you could back your car up to the site so you didn't have to haul supplies in. Another quick note is I hope you enjoy cold river water because that is the only running water on the campgrounds. Now that the campsite is out of the way, it's time to talk about the hikes.
West Maroon Trail
We got up early Friday morning and drove in so we started our first hike, West Maroon Trail, around 9:30 am. The first part of the hike is very flat and is the super touristy section that everyone goes to. The picture below is the one everyone is used to seeing. It's crazy how perfect the reflection is in the water.
After you pass Maroon Lake, which is around 9,580, you head up to Crater Lake. This trail is fairly strenuous as it goes over some rocky terrain and climbs to an elevation of 10,076. The views the entire way are very pretty and this is the last stop where you see quite a few people.
Once you get past that, you continue to climb uphill over similar terrain. When we went, there were still quite a few snowy sections so we weren't able to make it to the top. The first picture below is a view above Crater Lake with my carry on dog with me. He's got a bad back so he hikes for about 20 min and then gets carried for about 3 hours so he has a pretty solid deal. The next picture was around 11,400 and is where we started to get snowed out. We hiked along the side for a while but decided it wasn't worth it.
All in all this trail was a little over 9.5 miles round trip with around 1,400 elevation gain. It was a beautiful hike and I highly recommend it to anyone.
Maroon-Snowmass Trail to Willow Lake
The next day we started out doing the scenic loop trail. This is a very low key 1.5 mile loop that gives you a good view of the lake and also has a very good chance of seeing a moose or two, which is the only reason we did it. I recommend doing it just to say you did but it's pretty busy if you don't get there very early.
Now let's talk about the real hike. This hike starts in the same spot and goes all the way to Crater Lake so you get about 1.8 miles of the same terrain but it's still very pretty. Once you hit Carter lake you make a right and start a very long and tiring uphill climb. Since this is a hard hike, you instantly lose 99% of the people there which makes it well worth the isolation.
After you finish the initial climb, you are on the Minnehaha Gulch portion of the trail. This part is very pretty as you are walking in the woods above the creek. The creek was running pretty hard while we were there since the snow was melting. The picture below shows part of the creek where we had to take off our shoes and walk across since the snow bridge was very very sketchy.
Once you cross the creek, you start another uphill stretch but the views are well worth it. We didn't see any moose while we were on this trail but a lot of people do. This portion of the trail follows another smaller creek and is a mixture of rocky and wooded terrain. After a mile or two, we branched off from the creek and started to lose the trail in the snow. It was about 50/50 snow and normal trail until we got to the split to either do Buckskin Pass or Willow Pass. Both were pretty snowed out but we decided to do Willow Pass. I'd say about 30% of the trail didn't have snow on it and the rest was more of a trudge through hoping we were going the right direction. In the first picture below, you can see a red arrow on where the top of the pass was. The next picture shows part of the snowed out area that we had to walk through.
While that portion of the trail wasn't much fun, it was worth it at the top of the pass. The first picture is the other side of the pass with a frozen Willow Lake to the far right. Then the other picture is where we came from. If you look at the very bottom of the valley, that is Minnehaha Gulch.
So this is probably one of my top 2 hikes ever. It may have not been as much fun, but definitely easier, without the snow and river crossing but that made it worth it. The views are amazing the entire time so I highly recommend doing it but you will need to be in shape. Without going all the way to the lake, we still did around 11 miles with over 2,920 vertical gain. It even exhausted Deuce who didn't hardly hike at all.
Maroon Creek
The last day we wanted to keep it a little more low key so we decided to do the Maroon Creek Trail. This is a 6.4 mile round trip trail that follows the creek from Maroon Lake back towards the campsite. It was more of a wooded hike and then sections of meadows. We saw a few deer and moose have been known to be around the trail. While I'm glad we did it as I love hiking next to water, it was hard to compare it to the previous hikes since you don't get the expansive mountain views on this one. However it was a nice change of pace and I'm not sure if I could do another 2,000+ hike.
So in closing, I highly recommend going here. Even with us at the campsite only 2 miles away we had to get up pretty early to get a parking spot since it's so popular. On the bright side though, a lot of people go there for the very short hike and then leave by 10ish so if you don't care about seeing wildlife earlier in the morning, I'd recommend just waiting a little while to get a parking spot, if you are camping onsite that is since they only allow buses in and out after 8:00 am.
We took a ton of pictures so if you are interested in seeing anymore, you can find them here.
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