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Trip Report    

Palisades Peak & Marcus Peak

Trip on 10/4/2014
We took the trail towards upper Palisades Lake, intending to leave the trail and scramble the NE ridge. We wound up leaving the trail a little too soon and had to scramble some additional boulders in getting to the ridge. The ridge was an easy scramble and we dropped down the other side into the valley and headed towards the North ridge. Following the north ridge to the summit proved to be pretty brushy and required some zig-zagging to get past the worst of it. The rest of the hike to the summit was pretty easy.
After a short rest at the summit of Palisades we headed down the valley towards Marcus. We ascended the NW ridge and followed the ridgeline up until we ran into vertical rock, not knowing the route for sure we decided to traverse over to East ridge and found plenty of boot path sign and good rock to climb. We were able to scramble this route all the way to summit. A really fun T3-ish rock climb up to the summit with some mild exposure. We took a short break at the summit and then were able to find the route down to the NW ridge that we didn't find on the way up. This turned out to be a really fun way to do a loop of the summit and I would go this way again if heading to Marcus. We had planned on trying the ridge run from Marcus to Dege peak but it was getting late and having some tired folks, along with not finding a way down the west ridge we gave up on that idea pretty quickly and headed down the Hidden Lake trail and back to the parking lot. Total trip was about 9 miles and 7 hours.