Hiking to Maroon Bells

I shared our first day hiking in Aspen and I wanted to share our second day hiking in Aspen because it was a hike I’ll never forget. The main reason we decided to go to Aspen after all was to see the Maroon Bells.  I’d seen so many pictures of them and everyone says they’re so beautiful, I had to go! I’ve been wanting to see them since I moved to Colorado and this was finally our chance.

When we asked the man at our hotel about going to Maroon Bells, he said that the road to get there had closed two days earlier. Seriously?! I was SO disappointed and didn’t really believe him. I was just so determined to see those mountains! He did say that we could do the 8 mile hike from the road to the Bells but it’s so long he didn’t recommend it, especially since he wasn’t sure what the snow conditions would be like. He said we could also snow mobile there, but since Samson was with us we shut that idea down rather quickly.

Dave, my dad and I decided to go to the road and at least check it out. When we got closer towards the road to Maroon Bells we could see it was clearly closed. There was a big snow mound blocking the road and we couldn’t go any further. We parked on the side, packed some water, a few snacks and layers and followed the road on foot. The road really wasn’t bad at all, the snow was packed down so it was easy to walk on and my dad didn’t even have hiking boots with him. We thought we’d hike for a little while, see if we could see the Bells and then turn around.

The scenery along the road was gorgeous! There wasn’t any civilization around and to be honest, you feel so small out there surrounded by those big mountains. I love it! It looked like there was a fresh snow fall the night before and all the trees were covered in white. It was also a perfect sunny day, so slowly we started peeling off our layers. What wasn’t so comforting though, was that we saw a pretty big animal carcass. I’m not sure which type of animal it was and who had hunted it, but I didn’t really care to find out!

So we were hiking for a fair amount of time and this sounds kind of silly and a little ignorant, but this whole time we thought that the peak in the photo above was part of the Maroon Bells. There were very few people on the road so we happened to stop and ask someone if that was it and they said no, you had to keep walking further down the road, turn a few bends and then you’ll be able to see the Bells. So we kept on going…

These two were having a great time playing around on the trail. Samson would run up ahead of Dave, crouch down, lay down and then sprint back to him. They’re like two peas in a pod, these two!

We kept on hiking uphill and finally turned a big bend and there it was… Maroon Bells! Yay!

Haha you can tell from my facial expression I was SO happy to finally see them in person! Once we saw them we could totally tell that they were in fact THE Maroon Bells and why they get all this hype. They’re SO beautiful!

We kept hiking to get closer and closer. And of course, had plenty of stops for photos!

Planes kept flying over the Maroon Bells every 10 minutes and leaving behind a jet stream. We just stopped and watched and took it all in because rarely do you get the Maroon Bells all to yourself!

We also got our 2017 Christmas card photo below… so you can say the hike to Maroon Bells was a success!