Difficulty: Advanced. Pretty much a real grunt, but doable if you're healthy.
Roundtrip data: 12 miles, 4600' vertical, 9.5 hours at a quick clip
Starting elevation: 9600' (overnight lot at Maroon Bells)
Trailhead: Aspen closes car access to the Maroon Bells wilderness portal area from about 0800-1700 daily, and the only way up the road is on the RFTA busses. I recommend getting to the overnight parking lot the night before by arriving after say 7 pm, camping there in or in front of your car (weather dependent), and getting an early start the following morning. Plus you can get the pre-dawn views of the Bells this way.

Report: (The story gets interesting towards the bottom, really.) With all of the NWS satellites focusing on the problems with former hurricane Floyd, we had no clear view of the impending weather for central CO; hey guys, give us back our sats! The latest data available on Friday afternoon showed nothing but clear skies coming our way as the end of a low pressure system pushed out into the plains; at the same time, the forecast was for clear, sunny, and 80 on the Front Range. I figured out that they were wrong by the time I got to Twin Lakes, on the way over Independence Pass to Aspen Friday at dusk. Full obscuration clouds, heavy fog, and between drizzle and rain all the way in from there. Oh well, too much to hope for to actually have good weather in the Elks.

I was the only one in the overnight parking when I showed up around 9 pm Friday; there were a dozen other vehicles, but everyone seems to have been out camping higher up the basin already. They got wet, I stayed dry. It rained all night and they picked up a couple of inches of snow (loose, wet, early season crap) above 13000'; made for a muddy mess on the trail in the morning, anyway. Anyway, I was a wuss and just stayed in the car. Too much rain makes me do things like that.

I started moving from the (overly improved) trailhead at about 0700, passing a few photographers waiting for a nice glow on the Bells, which had a nice layer of snow on their upper ledges. The trail has been remade this year between Maroon Lake and the cutoff for Pyramid, and it's steeper; it's just as rocky and muddy, so I suspect they did this to make access more difficult and to dissuade dayhikers using the bus from going too far in. The trail is hard on the feet the whole way to the turnoff for South Maroon south ridge, about 4-4.5 miles in; lots of rocks poke out of the mud at strange angles and you have to pay attention the whole time you're hiking.

The trail cutoff for south ridge isn't very well defined, but here's how to find it: It's in the last small copse of trees (maybe 10 of them) along the trail, marked by a decaying log, two medium-sized rock cairns, and a 12' section of mud up the bank to your right. It's maybe a mile past Crater Lake, and just after the turnoff the creek turns into a small ditchy gorge, usually with a cap of snow-bridge over it.

The 'trail' up from here starts out going south a couple of hundred yards and then turns almost straight up towards an obvious notch (13300') in the ridge. If wet, the slope is muddy and slippery, and there's some pretty good rockfall danger from halfway up to the notch. Plan on an hour and a half to gut it out going up this. The notch has a nice panoramic view of both sides of the wilderness, and you can just see over to Capitol (but not to K2) around the northwest of Maroon. When I got here (with a couple of guys who just happened to be hiking at the same speed up to the ridge) the clouds approaching from the other side looked not too bad, but something to keep an eye on; pretty thin but grayer than optimal.

The trail from here, described as difficult to find, isn't too bad provided you can spot cairns and aren't afraid to make some iffy moves on generally more solid rock (I was surprised in general at how solid it was). There was snow on the west side of the ridge, where the 'trail' goes; as we started in on it, it started to graupel (styrofoam snow) on us. The graupel is good, as it packs in and generally helps hold loose stuff in place, where the wet stuff there only served to hide the crap under it. The route traverses a sideslope and climbs a couple of little colouirs to get to the notch where Garbage Chute terminates at around 13750'; I understand there is another route that continues traversing around the western side of the mountain, but we didn't see any use in following that. The more direct south ridge route worked pretty well for us.

From the notch here, you can climb almost directly up the ridge to the summit on solid blocks, with a couple of swings to climber's left and one to climber's right to get around 4th class stuff. The route back down is the same as the route up. Here's where our story gets interesting.

We'd just arrived on summit (two of us) and sat down to get some water. Jonas was pulling on a pair of polypro pants and I put on my jacket, after climbing in a vest for the last cold hour from the 13300' notch; Jonas swung around and looked at me, saying, "Hey, do you feel that?" I didn't feel anything, and it only took me a second or so to figure out exactly what he was talking about. He put on his boots, and got one tied; this is maybe 75 seconds after we'd actually touched top and sat down. My helmet suddenly started whistling lightly, so I thought there was a wind coming up from behind us. I reached back, and feeling nothing took another second to realize that the noise was more of a sizzling, like eggs on a hot skillet. It was my tech ice ax, safely strapped onto my carry loops on my pack, collecting static from swirling snow at the summit. Jonas and I looked at each other the same time and said, "Let's go, now." He later told me he couldn't hear the humming of my axe over the humming of his metal-rim eyeglasses. We were half-dressed, packs undone, Jonas with one boot untied, and we ran.

We were bounding straight down the south ridge at about top speed, making huge jumps down the big blocks. The humming kept going as we ran down until we could turn right and slide down the 4th class stuff we had climbed up earlier, and we got down a hundred meters from the summit or so. We took a second to tie boots and close open clothing, and then kept moving as the snow (still graupel) picked up and the cloud above us dropped right on us. Since the route follows mostly below the ridge, we still had to worry a lot about being in the area of a ground strike; there was another humming incident where we just turned and started sliding down some stuff I probably wouldn't have felt safe climbing up, even in good weather, and that put us off our trail a bit. However, it also kept us from getting insta-barbecued. The graupel actually helped us out. There was probably another 3" of snow by the time we got back to the 13300' notch, and it was packing in and keeping the little stuff from sliding out from underneath us as we ran across it.

Well, it was an adrenaline moment. The actual first bolts were hitting over by Hunter Peak, other side of Pyramid & towards Castle, about the time we were at 12600' on the grassy approach slope, and there were several up near Maroon Peak when we got down towards the main trail at 11400'. Still, that was close enough for either of us. It rained on us the whole rest of the way back until we got to the Buckskin Pass turnoff.

Lessons learned: (1) Never trust the weather in the Elks; it always sucks. (2) If anyone feels anything like static or their hair stands up or something starts humming, you're in big trouble. (3) You may be able to recover from a fall if you're running from a ground potential area, but you can't run from the electricity once you pass the critical buildup point. Take your chances with running, and if necessary, ditch your gear. (4) Move fast above treeline and never underestimate the potential for bad weather; the clouds can change character almost instantly. (5) Have an escape plan for things like this.