A little bit less than eight miles east of downtown Vail, Deluge Lake lies 11,748′ above sea level at the head of a scenic alpine valley embraced by the flanks of Snow Peak, Mt. Valhalla, Grand Traverse, and the forgetably named Peak 12485.

The lake is reached via a trail that starts at the Gore Creek trailhead just east of Vail proper.

I’ll pull the bandaid off this one quickly: the trail climbs well over three thousand feet in about four and a half miles. Alltrails says it’s 3444′, but according to the maps, the net gain is only (“only”, he says!) 3035′. The four-hundred-foot difference, then, is in miscellaneous dips and rises.

You can break it down into three sections. The first bit runs from the trailhead to about 11,000′. That’s roughly two and a quarter miles, for a slope of a bit more than a thousand feet per mile. The next section is about a mile and ends up still at 11000′, but it rises and falls a bit, so it’s not flat and level. The last section is a bit less than a mile and climbs the remaining 750′ (or a bit more), again with a slope approaching a thousand feet per mile.

July 17, 2024

Having learned where to park last week, I headed straight to the Vail Village parking structure. That’s co-located at the Vail Transportation Center, so I just had to climb a flight of stairs to get to the shuttle bus. My failure this time was not doing any reconnaissance at the trailhead. The shuttle bus drops hikers off at a stop about a quarter of a mile from the trailhead, so I added half a mile to the round-trip distance. And, naturally, you might guess that when I got to the trailhead at 8:30 I found that there was plenty of parking available. Note to self: when hiking from this trailhead on a weekday, check the availability of parking before resorting to the shuttle.

I started off at a very slow pace. I wanted to set a pace that I could maintain over the long haul. I was promptly passed by two women, then by three trail maintenance volunteers. Even in the middle not-cruelly-steep section, I didn’t speed up. And I was slow up the final lift. It wasn’t record-slow territory (I was slower going up the Manitou Incline), I averaged only a bit more than a mile an hour: trailhead to lake in four hours (3:59, to be precise).

I was at about the top of the first climb when I met the trail volunteers again. They were clearing deadfall off the trail. I chatted briefly with them; they clearly didn’t want to be distracted from their work. After passing them, I should have kept track of how many dead tree trunks were blocking the trail. It was in the neighborhood of a dozen. When I got to what turned out to be the last one, I couldn’t help but wonder how they’d deal with it. It was a giant trunk.

There were very few people on the trail. No faster hikers passed me on my way up, and I didn’t encounter anybody coming the other way until the last mile. I spent forty-five minutes at the lake in solitude.

My next meeting with the trail crew was at the large trunk. I could hear them before I saw them: the “thok thok thok” of wedges being hammered into wood. When I got there, they had managed to cut nearly through the 31″ trunk. I arrived unnoticed and eavesdropped for a minute. When they spotted me, they directed me around their work and onto the trail below. I turned to look up at them and immediately moved on: when they completed the cut, a large length of this trunk would roll down the trail to where I was standing.

Not long after, they passed me on their way back to the trailhead. The leader was now feeling chatty. “We cleared all the deadfall!” I told him I was impressed with how much work they’d done. I didn’t think they’d get that far, and I was impressed that they had a (relatively) easy answer to the big obstruction. He then told me his plans for the next week: clearing more trails just like they did today, starting at another giant log blocking another trail in the ENW, 5.9 miles from the trailhead.

Big thanks to the volunteers with the Eagle Summit Wilderness Alliance for maintaining the trail.

I was expecting to be a bit faster on the hike out than my rather glacial pace of the morning. I’ve never been that much faster going out/down than in/up, but given the steepness of this one, I figured there’d be no way it would take as long. I was right. It took me six minutes less to hike back. Okay, there was a short break to refill my water bottle, and a couple of minutes chatting with the crew. Still, surprisingly slow.