My climbing partner and I had a mini epic of 18.5 hours on Friday 6/24. We knew there would be a lot of snow but we were caught off guard by how much. We did the Bell Cord Couloir, Maroon, the traverse with a decent off of North Maroon. There was snow on all phases of our climbs, especially the decent on the North East ridge. The trail was almost totally snow bound, 3 to 4 feet deep in some places. The ascent of Maroon required scrambling with crampons and we even did a little dry tooling. Many of the class 4 portions of the traverse were snow bound forcing roped/belayed travel or extra 5th class. Plan for all of these climbs to take longer.
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