Bluebird Lake

Before I started this blog I had been posting trip reports to a forum for lovers of Rocky Mountain National Park. This is one of those reports, with only minor edits for clarity.

Hike date: 23 June 2012 — Originally posted: 26 June 2012 – 09:54 AM

Much of this trail passes through the Ouzel fire burn area and thus has no shade, so it’s not clear to me that Bluebird Lake was the best place to hike on one of the hottest days of the year. I’ve decided to avoid the construction on Bear Lake road for a while longer, and my last hike was from Lawn Lake so I figured Wild Basin was the place to be. I could just as easily have selected Lion Lake but I’ve been there a couple of times and never made it to Bluebird Lake.

Last spring I attempted Bluebird but stopped at the avalanche debris field. I probably could have wandered around and found the trail, but there was still quite a bit of snow and I thought it the debris field was quite interesting so I sat there and had my picnic, listening to the melt water cascade down the slope under the snow and seeing things settle while I sat there.

I hit the trail at 8am, the parking lot about half full. It was a pleasant morning and I only encountered a few people on the crowded part of the trail from the parking lot to Ouzel Falls. While passing through the burned areas below the falls I was thinking that in perhaps another 20 years you wouldn’t know there was a fire there. I made pretty good time, reaching the falls in just over an hour. I stopped there for a few minutes to slather on some SPF 3000 before navigating the next section of trail where there’s no shade.

I arrived at the spur trail to Ouzel Lake at 10am. My earlier thought that 20 more years would erase much of the fire damage may be true lower down, but here it will likely be another century. It may be my feeble memory, but I’m thinking the aspen on the top of the ridge here have grown noticeably in the last year, but on the slopes above the trail there’s still nothing but grass and dead tree trunks after 34 years.

A few minutes later I passed through last year’s avalanche debris. If I hadn’t known it was there I wouldn’t have noticed it. There was “fresh” sawdust where a couple of tree trunks were cut to clear the trail, but that’s about it.

There was almost no snow left on the trail, only about a hundred yards of it to cross just below the outlet of the lake. From Ouzel Falls to the lake, I only met four other people on the trail, not bad for a weekend. Two guys passed me going up, headed to summit either Copeland or Isolation (they hadn’t decided) and two solo women on their way down from Bluebird. Both noted that it was quite windy at the lake.

I reached Bluebird Lake at 11:30 and stayed nearly an hour. I set up the GoPro for a time lapse. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky in any direction. I heard the occasional jetliner pass overhead but even those left no contrails. (So there’s nothing to see in the resulting time lapse video.) It was quite breezy, but that’s more or less to be expected. There was also a rich insect life in evidence – swarms of gnats and mosquitoes. I had the choice of sitting out of the wind in a swarm of insects or out of the insects in the wind. I chose the wind.
On the way out the trail was much busier. Between the lake and the Ouzel trail spur I passed maybe 20 people, and obviously the lower sections of the trail were quite busy with folks wearing flip flops and carrying little or no water.

I never saw any smoke from either the fire in Estes (which I didn’t learn about until later) or the High Park fire. And not a cloud in the sky all day.

I was to meet my brother for a beer at Oskar Blues in Lyons but my wife had called him to tell him about the fire on High Drive. Neither of them knew exactly where the fire was, but they’d heard the south entrance to the park was closed so he headed up there to look for me. I always tell my wife where I’m hiking, but I’ve never thought to tell her where I’m driving. So I had to sit and drink beer for a while before my brother arrived.