Aspen Highlands Bowl

Author's Comments

There is a particular kind of quiet at the top of the boot-pack, where the ridge narrows and the wind has scoured the snow into something closer to bone than powder. Most people who make this climb are thinking about the descent. I am usually thinking about the view across. The Maroon Bells are photographed from one place, mostly. You know the photograph. The lake, the reflection, the two peaks rising in perfect symmetry at golden hour. It is a great photograph and it has been made ten million times. From the ridge above Highland Bowl, you see the Bells from the side, with Pyramid Peak rising sharp to the south, and the angle is so different that for a moment you have to reorient. This is the same range. This is what it looks like when no one is photographing it. Winter mornings are the strongest argument for the climb. The boot-pack line of skiers traversing the ridge, dark figures against a white spine of snow, gives you a sense of scale that the landscape alone cannot quite provide. A wide lens for the bowl and the Bells together. A longer lens for the line of climbers, who become almost abstract at distance. Summer is gentler and emptier. The hiking is real but the ridge is yours. The avalanche paths that define the bowl in winter become green chutes streaked with wildflowers, and the Bells across the valley take on their warmer summer color in the early hours before the haze builds. This is not a place you stumble onto. That is part of why it stays worth it.

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