Maude has been on my list for a while now and it did not disappoint. My friend at I started around 5:30 am. The first 3 miles are flat. After you turn up Leroy TH it's very steep for the mile to the basin. The views of Seven Finger Jack almost made me climb that instead. We started the traverse over to Maude. We were planning on the standard route that traverses all the way to a notch on climbers right then all the way back up the ridge. We kept assessing our options along the way and I'm glad we did. There is quite a bit of snow left in the area. We decided to take a gully up to a steep snow filled coulior instead of going all the way around. So so so glad we did this. The snow was firm and fun to climb and the gully wasn't terribly loose (not the case for the others). We hit the ridge and walked up to the summit, which seemed like it took forever even after cutting off a bunch of distance. We made it to the summit in 5 hours.
The views from the top were out of this world. Such a great position. We lounged around in the sun for a long time, getting annoyed by bugs. We started down the standard route. In hindsight I wish we would have downclimbed the snow slope and gully we went up. We encountered sketchy snow conditions on the standard route in a notch that I did not want to cross. So we went down another gully, which was loose, traversed way over under the standard route on chossy loose crap and soft snow. We finally made it to the notch where Carne and Maude break off. We would have loved to make it a loop with Carne but with snow conditions decided against it. So we plunge stepped and traversed over to the "trail" which was snow covered except a very few intermittent glimpses. Made it back to the basin and trail and to the car. Creek crossings are high right now so expect your boots to get wet. There are about 5 of them, maybe more. Please be proficient in route finding and self arrest to attempt this right now. GPS highly recommended out there. Also of note is that I did not consider this much of a scramble at all. It took us as long to go up as down. 15 miles, 6300' total gain.
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