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Escaping the crowd at Maroon Lake |
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Wednesday, October 19, 2011 06:35 |
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Photo by Janet Urquhart, The Aspen Times
By JANET URQUHART, THE ASPEN TIMES
ASPEN — There's an adage about hiking two or three miles up a popular trail and leaving 95 percent of the crowd behind. Nowhere can that be more true than at Maroon Lake, where I suspect the vast majority of visitors never see much more than what they could get from a postcard.
I got up there about 10 a.m. Saturday — on the final weekend that $10 was being charged at the entrance station — and was surprised to find the parking lot closest to the lake nearly full. The fall colors, or what's left of them, are well past their prime, but the emerald water, blue skies and the Maroon Bells, striped with snow, were hard to beat for scenery.
Much of the crowd was lingering along the shoreline or spread out on the trail to Crater Lake (the latter was a veritable ant line of people on my return), but once I reached Crater Lake and made the turn toward Buckskin Pass, the wilderness was mostly mine. My destination was not the pass, but merely the subalpine meadows above Minnehaha Gulch, where I staked out a spot for lunch with views of North Maroon and Pyramid peaks.
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