We had a leisurely morning. As our hike out would only take three hours (or a bit less, perhaps), we weren’t in any particular hurry.
I told Gordon that it wasn’t a marmot that ate my stuff. He told me he was visited by a squirrel that was trying to get into his things. He managed to shoo it away. I wondered if I shooed it towards him, or he towards me, or both. Pesky squirrel. I really do hope it got a bad case of the runs.
When I was packing up, I noticed that he’d gone after my backpack, too. He ate the zipper pulls on two of the pockets and devoured about half the mesh. Surely this is a sign of malice rather than a desire for salt. I really don’t sweat all over the zipper pulls.
Squirrel Damage Assessment
I’ve been saying for years that, for every situation, there’s either a Star Trek quote or a Monty Python quote that is apt. I’m tempted here to use “That rabbit’s dynamite!” from the Holy Grail and substitute “squirrel” for “rabbit”. Instead, I’ll go back to World War II and BDA: Bomb Damage Assessment. While my antagonist squirrel may be as vicious as Monty Python’s Rabbit of Caerbannog, it never tried to decapitate me, even though it was well within range. In the aftermath of our encounter, I am left to assess the damage.
Tasty Poles?
Delicious Day Pack?
Mmm, Mmm, Good Mesh!
The poles are the type that you twist to tighten to the proper length. I’ve never been happy with them and would have preferred to get the ones that use a cam. I guess this is an opportunity to upgrade. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can find somebody to mend the packs.
The deeper question is: How do I prevent this from happening again (apart from never camping at Dutch Town)? My tent is too small to store all my belongings in it. I’d really rather not spray all my belongings with coyote piss or the like.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
There was at least one healthy doe that frequented the area around our camp. I spotted a doe five or six times. It may have been the same one every time, maybe there was more than one. She went by my tent that first night.
The air traffic was pretty annoying. Even in the wilderness, it’s everpresent. But here it was loud. They went right over us. I decided I should time them the night before. I noted the time of the next one: 7:09. Didn’t hear another plane for half an hour when a two-engine propellor plane went over. So at least they weren’t so bad at night. Then two came over at about 6 am that were really low, just to remind us they were still there.
Just as we left the Ditch, a pickup truck when by on the service road. Water Supply & Storage Company. Those guys have owned the Ditch since 1891. They operate a vast system of canals and reservoirs in the Poudre River valley.
Now that I know the route, I think it’s possible Lake of the Clouds is within my day hiking range. It would certainly be an easy hike with a single-night stay at Dutch Town. We were back to camp early enough we could have packed up and hiked out on Tuesday.
The mosquitoes were not nearly as bad as at Upper Ouzel Creek. I finally did apply some bug spray at one point, but I wouldn’t have been terribly upset had I forgotten to bring it.
We saw no other hikers until we got within a quarter mile of the Colorado River. I don’t doubt Foster’s word that that Lake of the Clouds is the most visited destination in the area. This indicates that, if you’re seeking solitude, the Never Summer Mountains are the place to go.
I awoke a bit after sunrise after a somewhat chilly night to clear blue skies. It looked to be another marvelous day in the Park.
The first thing I noticed was that my trek poles, which I had leaned up against a long, downed tree, had been knocked over. Maybe the deer (or whatever) that passed through last night knocked them over. On closer inspection, though, the grips of both poles had been munched on and the straps had been eaten completely. Did that passing deer eat my poles?
A few minutes later, we were greeted by a Park Service trail crew. They were here to make a few improvements to the campsite. The ranger in charge asked to see our permit while the crew stowed their shovels and axes not far from where Gordon and I put our bear canisters overnight.
Having established our right to be here, I started asking the ranger questions. How did you get here so early? “We drove along the Ditch from Poudre cabin, so we had a short hike.” What creature did this skull belong to? “I don’t know. Not an ungulate.” What do you suppose ate my trek poles? “Probably a marmot. They want the salt from your sweat.” Did this campsite use to be over there beyond the preservation area sign? “Yes. It was threatened by dead trees so we moved it here.”
Last evening I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what percentage of trees in the area have succumbed to pine beetles. After much study, it became clear to me that all the dead trees were the largest trees. I’d guess nine out of ten of the largest quartile or quintile of trees were dead but very few of the medium and small trees were. I couldn’t help but wonder if all beetle-kill was this way and I just never noticed it before, or if things were different in this area. So I asked the ranger.
While I was correct that these trees had been killed by beetles, they were from the spruce beetle, which is a cousin of the pine beetle. Spruce beetles go after the big trees first, those with trunk diameters greater than ten inches. The victims in this area have been dead for a while – none are brown, they’re all gray.
Before they worked on our campsite, they headed up to Lake of the Clouds. They said it would take them about an hour to get there from here, which is only a bit less than I’d guessed it might take us. They left and we finished our breakfasts and got ready for our hike.
I grabbed my day pack, which is the top part of my backpack. It has a compartment you unzip to reveal the shoulder straps for the day pack. I’d stored this in the atrium of my tent (the space between the tent and the rain cover). It sat all night about six inches from my head, where the rustling noises were last night. It turns out my marmot friend didn’t just dine on my trek poles but worked my day pack over pretty well. Each shoulder strap was half eaten through and much of the fabric at the top was thoroughly chewed up. I wasn’t hearing the breeze rustle my tent, I was hearing a rodent wrecking my stuff. I hope that marmot got a really bad case of diarrhea.
Luckily, it was still intact enough to get me through the day. I hoped. As long as I didn’t put too much weight in the pack.
Anyhow, lunch and water and GoPro in the mangled pack, using my now strapless and heavily gnawed trek poles, we headed up the trail to Lake of the Clouds.
The trail ends well before the lake, where it exits the forest and dumps the hiker on the shore of a sea of talus. To the south, to the north, and to the west, nothing but talus. I vaguely recall writing on this blog some time ago about a large amount of talus. Wherever that was, there is more talus here. (It isn’t only here – our campsite has a view of the north slope of Howard Mountain. It’s all talus. Except for some that looks like scree.)
The first thing I did, once we had the route to the lake in view, was to search for the work party. I found them, but not where I expected them to be. When I was here on my failed day-hike, I thought that if I hadn’t made my 45-minute wrong turn I’d have made it to the lake. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it because I surely wouldn’t have gone the correct way.
We worked our way across the talus between the end of the trail and the base of the slope we’d have to climb. That slope is talus. We worked our way up between a couple of growths of willow and over to a grassy ramp. Once on the ramp, the route of cairns was pretty easy to follow. There may be cairns in the talus we had to cross, but finding a cairn in a talus field is like finding a pile of rocks in a bigger pile of rocks.
The ramp is broken in the middle by another section of talus. Imagine that. Back on the ramp, following the cairns, we crossed the lake’s outlet stream and arrived atop the bench that holds the lake. It took us an hour and twenty minutes to get here from camp.
The slopes of Howard Mountain and Mount Cirrus rise steeply 1400′ above the lake. You guessed it: talus everywhere. The rocks these mountains are made of aren’t the giant granite slabs you see above Black Lake, for example. The rocks on Howard and Cirrus are fractured and full of cracks running in all directions. The freeze-thaw cycle undoubtedly keeps a significant amount of rock falling, endlessly adding to the piles of talus.
As is my wont, I chatted a bit with the members of the work crew. They were celebrating the end of the season (even though they’ll be working another month). The ranger in charge told me she has been doing this for eighteen years. She’s been just about everywhere in the Park but doesn’t visit very many summits. One of the guys will turn 30 in a couple of weeks. He decided that he’d take a dip in 30 lakes by then. Today he got his 23rd and he’s confident that he’ll get the remaining seven without too much difficulty. One day last week, he got six in one day: The Loch, Mills, Jewel, Black, Blue, and Green.
Gordon set off to circumnavigate the lake while I surveyed my surroundings. Looking out over the valley below, my metaphor likening the talus to a sea couldn’t be more apt. This sea of rock is arranged in what looks like storm-tossed waves. The troughs of the waves are lighter in color than the tops due to weathering.
I was surprised the lake was so green. Fluorescent green, nearly.
We stayed at the lake for a bit more than two hours. On the way down, we lost our chain of cairns a couple of times, forcing us to backtrack. And when we went looking for the terminus of the trail, we found we’d gone much too far to the north. Rather than backtracking across the talus, we worked our way back to the forest and followed a game trail back to the main trail.
Use the Grassy Ramp (photo from 2013)
Working our way up
A Cloud, Never Summer Peak, and Gordon
Lake of the Clouds
Lake of the Clouds
Lake of the Clouds
North Specimen, Specimen Mountian, South Specimen
A Sea of Talus
Campsite improvement: before
Campsite improvement: after
Today’s Beer
When we arrived at our campsite, the work crew had already left. They cut a long section out of the tree trunk I’d had my poles leaning on overnight. This expanded the area where one might want to pitch a tent. As I said earlier, I saw an axe and shovels. But they must have had a power saw and something to shred the tree trunk. To level the ground, they didn’t move any dirt around, they just spread a thick layer of shredded tree trunk. It looked like it might be comfy, but I wonder how well it’ll hold tent spikes and suspect it’ll retain a fair amount of water after a rain.
At ten minutes to four, I thought we were going to get a visitor. Pretty much wherever we sat at the campsite, we could see the main trail. I saw a lone hiker come up to the sign, look up at the campsite, then check his map. He had a full backpack – much more than he’d need for a day hike. My first thought was that maybe he had a permit for this site but showed up a day early. But after a short pause, he continued up the trail. If he was a day hiker, he was pretty late. As it takes more than an hour to reach the lake, he’d be looking at passing our site no sooner than 6 pm. We never did see him again, so my guess is he camped at Lake of the Clouds without a permit. I wonder how often that sort of thing happens.
When it came time to bed in for the night, I made sure to keep wearing my headlamp. If that pesky marmot made a return visit, I wanted to be able to scare him away without rummaging around for my light.
Sure enough, sometime around midnight, I heard a rustling noise. I turned the lamp on and found myself eyeball to beady little eyeball with… a squirrel! The little bastard was about four inches away from my face. The light didn’t scare him off – I had to hiss at him. We repeated this little ritual three or four more times before he finally gave up.
I take back all the bad things I was thinking about marmots.
Foster tells us that Lake of the Clouds is the “most highly visited destination in the Never Summer Mountains”. I don’t doubt her, but if it’s true it tells me just how few people visit any destination in the Never Summer Mountains. (She certainly includes only the mountain destinations and not those in the valley, like Lulu City.)
I tried to reach Lake of the Clouds quite a while ago as a day hike. I wasted some time with a navigation error and made it only to where the trail ends on the map. Since then, I’ve suspected it was out of my day hike range, and decided to give it the two-night treatment: hike to the campsite on day one, hit the lake (or lakes) on day two, and hike out on day three.
The trail is accessed from the Colorado River trailhead. I’ve never seen that lot full, so we could pick our own departure time without worrying about getting a place to park.
Monday, August 29
We had a leisurely 7 am departure from my house, traffic wasn’t horrible, and we put boots on the trail at 9:20.
The first section of trail goes due north from the parking lot for half a mile to a trail junction. Many hikers won’t go any farther than here, or hereabouts. There’s a bridge over the Colorado river a few yards from the junction. Most of those who don’t stop here will continue on toward Lulu City. To reach Lake of the Clouds (or our campsite, Dutch Town), you make the left turn and take the route less traveled.
After crossing the valley, the trail turns south to climb the lower flank of Red Mountain. The trail traverses a fairly steep slope and by the time it has gained about four hundred feet, the hiker is presented with a view of the trailhead parking lot. It surprises me how often a trail gains four hundred feet from a valley floor up to a bench. That happens here, and although there are no lakes on this bench, there are some wetlands.
Having gone a very short distance south of our starting point, the trail turns around and heads generally north until it comes out on the service road for the Grand Ditch. The Grand Ditch is a water diversion project that is capable of taking all the water on the east side of the Never Summer Range and putting it into Long Draw Reservoir, which feeds the Cache la Poudre River.
The trail continues along the ditch for nearly two miles. I’d say that there’s more water flowing in it than in the Colorado River just below us. The ditch is flowing opposite to the river, but we’re at about the midpoint of the ditch, so it’s not a bad approximation that where we crossed the river, there should be more than twice as much water in it. It’s indicative of the abuse the Colorado River gets that, in its first 15 or 20 miles, more than half its water has been rerouted.
From the start of the hike to a fair piece northward along the Ditch, traffic noise from Trail Ridge Road has been a constant companion. As we approach the end of our flat and level stroll on the service road, we’re about a mile north of the highway and turning west. The road noise fades away. Now we can easily hear the jet airliners passing overhead. The westbound ones are a bit north of us, but the eastbound fly directly overhead.
At the Lake of the Clouds trail junction with the Grand Ditch, there’s a sign that indicates Dutch Town is 1.3 miles distant, and Hitchens Gulch is .8 miles. I never did see any sign for the Hitchens Gulch campsite, going or coming, so I suspect it’s no longer in use. I also suspect the miles are inflated a bit. I reckon it’s more like .7 to Dutch Town. It took us thirty minutes to get from the Ditch to the campsite. That’s a five-hundred-foot gain, so I think 1.4 miles per hour is much more reasonable than the 2.6 miles per hour required by the sign.
It took us three hours of hiking to make the trip. Add some time for our break at the base of the Lake of the Clouds trail. Since we crossed the Colorado River, we had encountered only three other people. They had camped at Valley View, very close to where the trail first reached the Ditch. There was nobody at our site, which surprised me. If I could have gotten a Sunday/Monday instead of our Monday/Tuesday, I would have. Either the previous occupants of Dutch Town made it to the trailhead before we left, or they hiked to another campsite. Or, possibly, they canceled. No matter.
The Mighty Colorado River
At the Ditch
Mystery Skull
Today’s beer
Some previous occupant of the campsite left us a present: a somewhat chewed-up skull. I have no idea what sort of creature it belonged to. It’s just the skull; no mandible, and it’s not obvious where the mandible would attach. The brain would be a bit smaller than my fist.
I’ll admit that I’m a bit spoiled backpacking in the Park, given the generally outstanding trails and campsites. That said, I’ve only camped in about half a dozen established campsites in the Park. This one is a bit different than the others I’ve been to. First, it’s very close to the trail and my tent is clearly visible from the trail even before reaching the sign and spur trail. Second, it’s not ideal for water. Sitting at the campsite, the stream is audible. But what can be heard is water flowing under some talus. Just upstream, the stream is very wide, very shallow, and flows slowly. Here, the streambed is a soft mud that is easily disturbed. I use a SteriPen rather than a filter and it was impossible to get any water without a bit of sediment. It is necessary to go quite a way upstream to avoid the sediment.
A few yards from the level spots at the site, there’s a sign saying “Restoration Area: Stay Off”. I believe the site was located by this sign in years past. Here, tents wouldn’t be visible from the trail. The difference in location wouldn’t have made much difference as to water, though.
On my last backpacking trip, I brought the critter cam. The only critter it spotted was me. I probably should bring it every trip, but I figured I didn’t want to carry the extra weight. I should have brought it.
At about 10:30 I was awakened by something moving through the campsite. It sounded like a large quadruped. I’ve had moose go past my tent. It wasn’t exactly a quiet animal. This one was quiet, so I guessed it was either an elk or a deer. It didn’t linger and was quickly out of earshot.
Later, I heard my tent rustling. It sounded like the rain cover was being disturbed by a slight breeze. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. But things are not always what they seem.
As I tend to do, I kept a browser tab open for about a week showing the topo map of the area I’m going to hike. This week, it was Betty and Bob Lakes in the IPW. They, and King Lake, form the headwaters of South Fork Middle Boulder Creek. (Last week I hiked along North Fork Middle Boulder Creek.)
I came up with all sorts of possibilities, most of which I discarded. In the end, my plan was to get to Betty and Bob Lakes, then do the side trip to King Lake. I had considered going cross-country from Bob to King but figured it’d be faster to use the trail even though it meant losing and regaining about 300′ of elevation. Another one I considered was skipping King and going over the ridge between Betty and Skyscraper Reservoir, collecting Woodland Lake, and returning by the Woodland Lake trail. This would have been the same mileage and elevation gain as doing Betty, Bob, and King. The big unknowable until reaching the top of the ridge is the state of the terrain on the other side.
Monday, July 22
Parking for the Hessie Trailhead is just a short distance past the town of Eldora, on the side of the road. The map indicates a road from this point to a small parking lot at the trailhead, but the road is closed now. It’s about half a mile to the parking lot. More, actually, because there were already ten cars parked on the road. Before I had changed into my boots, two more cars came in and parked.
When I put boots on the trail, the sun had not yet climbed above the ridge, so the area was in shadow. I was thinking I’d be walking on the old road, but right away the road wasn’t so much “road” as “river”. A narrow trail snakes alongside the road/river. It was dark, and last night’s rain still clung to the grass, leaves, and pine needles. The temperature was in the low forties and the humidity made it clammy. It felt a bit … primordial.
The trailhead is right on the river. (North Fork Boulder Creek. The North and South Forks have their confluence just out of sight about five hundred feet downstream.) The parking lot isn’t the end of the road. There’s a stout pedestrian bridge next to a wide, shallow ford for vehicles and livestock. The 4×4 road and trail are one and the same nearly to the IPW boundary. The road crosses the river again, this time using a fairly new bridge (South Fork this time). I’m guessing it was replaced after the 2013 floods. At this bridge is the junction with the trail to Jasper Lake, Storm Lake, and Devil’s Thumb Lake. You could use it for Woodland Lake/Skyscraper Reservoir as well.
Continuing up the road, we next come to a nice waterfall. Not far past the falls is the junction with the Lost Lake trail and a couple bends past that is the junction with the Woodland Lake trail (which could also be used for Jasper, et al). At this junction, we are finally off the disused jeep trail. I didn’t like the road – it was full of loose rocks. At times, I felt like a drunken sailor when a rock would shift underfoot. A quarter of a mile farther on, the trail finally reaches the boundary of Indian Peaks Wilderness, a mile and a half (or more) from the car.
Carved by glaciers, the valley is U-shaped, with the stream at the bottom and the trail a bit above the river, always audible but not always in sight. It’s a nice trail, of fairly constant slope, free of rocks and roots for extended distances, allowing for consistent strides. The forest obscures any surrounding views but isn’t dense – the trees are spaced farther apart than usual, and the sun illuminates the grass and flowers on the forest floor.
Approaching the head of the valley, the forest starts breaking up and the mountain to the south is revealed. Only glimpses to begin, but just before the trail climbs up off the valley floor we see the whole mountain flank. The Rollins Pass Road is clearly visible. There’s a short section where the trestles still stand, but most of the mountainside is littered with old lumber from the road.
The history of Rollins Pass is extensive, with archeological studies indicating it was in use as much as 10,000 years ago. The lumber strewn along the mountainside is what’s left of the snowsheds used by the railroad. Essentially, the snowshed was an almost continuous wooden tunnel that ran near the summit. The idea was to keep the railroad operational for more than just August (workers on the Moffat Road had an adage: “There’s winter and then there’s August”). The snowshed wasn’t a great success. Trains were often stranded for several days (sometimes weeks) during heavy snowstorms because snow could fall or be blown through the wood planking of the sheds. Coal smoke and toxic gasses from the locomotive collected in the snowsheds often causing temporary blindness, loss of consciousness, and sometimes death. The snowsheds are long gone, but the lumber debris has been there for a century and will likely be around for centuries more.
The map shows there’s a pond in the valley below where the trail snakes up the wall, but the map is incorrect. The trail tops out of its climb and reaches the spur trail to Betty and Bob Lakes. ProTrails says the section from the junction to the lake is tricky through willow and krummholz. I found it fairly obvious and easy to follow.
About three hundred feet higher than the trail junction we find Betty Lake. My plan was to skip right on by and take my first break at Bob Lake. Here is where I was foiled. The trail crosses the outlet of Betty, which flows through a bunch of willow. It flows fast and deep. There are two or three branches thrown across, but they’re old and small. When I put any weight on them, they bowed badly. It’s too far to jump. If I had bothered to bring my trek poles, I’d have crossed it without too much trepidation. But the risk isn’t just wet feet: I judge the water to be nearly thigh deep here.
The lesson here is to bring the poles on routes I haven’t traveled before.
I spent a few minutes looking through the krummholz for a dead limb I could use as a pole to make the crossing but couldn’t find anything. So I gave up and looked for a nice spot for a short break. I worked my way to the north shore and got the idea that I could get to Bob this way, but when I worked around to where I could see the whole route there was more willow than I wanted to deal with. So much for going to Bob.
I had a snack on the shore of Betty, but I didn’t linger long. I worked my way back down to the King Lake junction and headed up that way. The trail continues past the lake and up to the Continental Divide, reaching a parking lot on Rollins Pass.
Trestles
Betty Lake
King Lake
At the Pass
Food for Thought
Taking a Dip
Snowshed Debris
“Look out! There are llamas!”
A couple of hikers arrived just after I did. They wanted me to take their picture, and we chatted a bit. They left about the same time another couple hiked down from the pass. These two were from Arkansas and had rented a 4×4 for the trip over the pass. The guy stripped down to his shorts and took a quick swim in the lake.
I stayed at King for nearly an hour, ate my picnic lunch, drank my beer (Tivoli Brewing’s Mile Hi Hefe, which I’ll have to call “Two Mile Hi Hefe”), and watched the world go by.
The weather couldn’t decide whether to be threatening or not. A short squall blew over while I was going from Betty to King but it didn’t amount to much. After leaving King, I heard thunder to the north, but I could see no dark clouds and there were large patches of blue sky overhead. The thunder died out after twenty minutes or so, except for one late rumble perhaps fifteen minutes later.
On the hike out, I ran into a couple about my age. They were carrying backpacks and had with them three fully-loaded llamas. We had a quick chat. They were looking for nice camping spots near King Lake. I can’t help but wonder how long they were going to stay, and in what luxury. They must have had a couple of hundred pounds of gear.
When my water was two-thirds gone, I found a nice rock to sit on beside the stream. I ate my peach (a delicious Colorado Palisade peach: big, sweet, and juicy) and then refilled my water bottle.
I started early enough this morning that I encountered only two hikers between the car and the King Lake junction. It was quite a bit more crowded in the afternoon, particularly after I started passing the various trail junctions. I ran across so many people, I was trying to picture how far down the road people must have parked. I even ran into a group of four or five folks wearing flip-flops and carrying no water. I don’t imagine they made it too far.
Back at the car, I felt pretty worn out. But it was a good worn-out.
I’ll definitely do some more hiking from the Hessie trailhead. By missing Bob Lake this time, I have an excuse to do this trail again. Skyscraper Reservoir is still in use, so I’d like to get a good look at it and compare it to the former reservoirs in the Park. Counting the three lakes I tried to get to today, there are eight lakes on Hessie trails that are at roughly 11,000′ to 11,500′ in elevation within a mile or so of the Continental Divide.
Lake Dorothy sits in a cirque at 12,067′ in the shadow of Mount Neva, a few feet of elevation above Arapaho Pass. It is the highest named lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. It covers about fourteen acres and is a hundred feet deep. There are native cutthroat trout in it, but I understand they are wily and elusive. The Continental Divide makes a turn from north/south to east/west here, and Lake Dorothy occupies the corner. To both the north and west, the divide is only a couple of hundred yards away.
You take the Arapaho Pass trail to reach it, and you’ll find that at the Fourth of July trailhead. Take Eldora Rd west from CO 119 in Nederland. At the west end of the town of Eldora, the pavement ends. From here, it’s five miles of pot-holed dirt road. We just had a couple of days of heavy rain, so all the holes were filled with water. It’s slow going. I was able to dodge most of the puddles but you just can’t miss them all. In the end, the parking lot was full of SUVs, pickups, and Subaru Outlanders. But one guy did get in there with his Ford Escort station wagon, so it’s doable without a huge amount of ground clearance.
The road to the Fourth of July trailhead is called Fourth of July road. And, of course, there’s the Fourth of July mine. The trailhead and road get their names from the mine, which is so named because C.C. Alvord discovered a silver lode there on the Fourth of July, 1872. More about that later.
The satellite image of the trailhead shows a full parking lot and cars parked along the road for quite some distance. I reckoned it wise to get there early and to have a Plan B in case I found no place to park. I left the house at six and satnav said I’d be there by 7:15. It is quite a crowded trailhead. I had two cars in front of me on the way in in the morning. The lot was about two-thirds full so I’d guess people started parking on the road by 7:45 at the latest.
When I left, the lot was full and cars lined the road for a considerable distance.
I put boots on the trail at 7:30. The car’s thermometer said the outside air temperature was 47. I kept the jacket in the pack figuring the exertion would keep me warm enough. Some of last night’s raindrops still clung to the pine needles. Given the amount of recent rain, the trail wasn’t terribly muddy and there weren’t that many puddles.
The trail climbs pretty steadily at about five hundred feet per mile. From the trailhead to the lake, it runs in a large arc, bending toward the west as it climbs the south-facing flank of Quarter to 5 Peak. It doesn’t meander at all and has only two short pairs of switchbacks. The first section of the hike is in dense forest. Shortly after the junction with the trail to Diamond Lake, the trail emerges from the trees onto a wide bench.
After crossing a couple of very wide, very shallow streams you reach the next trail junction and the Fourth of July mine. Take a right turn at the junction to climb a punishing twenty-one hundred feet in 2.2 miles to summit South Arapaho Peak. A shorter hike up that trail gets to a viewpoint of Arapaho Glacier. From this junction, the trail is visible on the mountainside above. Instead, I’m happy to keep the same bearing and continue following the arc’s not-too-strenuous climb to Arapaho Pass.
First, I poked around the mine for a quick minute. There are a few rusted machines and the remnants of a couple of timbers. There are some very small stakes ringed around a hole. The hole is the mine. Supposedly, it’s more than two hundred feet deep. There’s nothing covering the hole. Aside from two or three timbers, there is no sign of any structures here.
Once you pass the mine, you can see the trail almost all the way to the lake. From here to about a hundred yards from the lake you travel on an old roadbed. There are two different I’ve read about this road. It was built in 1900. One story is that they ran out of money when they reached the pass. The other says that two companies agreed to build the road, but the one on the west side didn’t build anything.
Today, standing at the pass, it’s striking that the old road was on an ideal route to the pass: an almost constant grade, no switchbacks, no having to dodge rock outcroppings, just a nearly straight shot. It’s also striking how the other side of the pass is a horrible place to try to put a road. This was before the automobile, and I don’t have any idea what the turning radius is for a team of oxen pulling a wagon. But you’re gonna need a bunch of switchbacks to go down that hill.
I imagine a light-duty road built for wagons more than a century ago would have been quite fragile and require a fair amount of maintenance to keep operational. It hasn’t been maintained in a century but there are still considerable stretches where it’s surprisingly intact. Long sections of retaining wall supporting the downslope side are still solid. Many places, of course, have fallen or eroded.
There’s another trail junction at the pass. One way heads eight hundred feet down the other side to Caribou Lake. The other goes to Lake Dorothy or to Caribou Pass (which is not on the Continental Divide). A short climb above the junction is rewarded with the first view of the lake.
It took me a few minutes short of two hours to make the hike. I was expecting to take more like two and a half, so I was pleased with myself. I found a nice spot along the water to sit and watch the world go by.
A few seconds after sitting down, I noticed I picked a spot only about fifteen yards from somebody’s backpack. I didn’t see who belonged to it. There was a hiker some distance away from me who was just leaving and I didn’t see anybody else. Then I started hearing voices and figured the pack’s owner and a friend were further along the shore, around a slight bend.
I couldn’t pinpoint the voices. Instead of being out of sight on my shore, it started sounding like perhaps they were on the opposite shore. I scanned the whole place but didn’t see anybody. After a bit, I heard a rock falling somewhere. It’s not uncommon. This one I thought sounded like it was the result of a footstep, but I couldn’t tell you why. A few minutes later, there was a second one.
Eventually, I spotted them. There were two: a man and a woman, by the sound of their voices. They were on the opposite side of the lake, but not on the shore. They were at the very top of the spine on the north ridge of Mount Neva, five hundred feet above the lake. I spotted the white helmet before I saw the orange one.
The mountain’s spine there resembles a flat W. I first spotted them when they reached the bottom of the right-hand part. They were going north to south, or right to left. They went right along the top – they were in silhouette quite often. The things people do. I could never do that. I’d be petrified, immobile. But the world would be a boring place if we all liked the same things.
On the old road
Mount Neva
Insignificance
Mountaineers and Moonset
South shore view
Windbreak
I enjoyed my surroundings for an hour and a quarter before packing up and heading back down the hill. It was too early for lunch but I figured by the time I got back down to the mine I’d be ready. There was a nice open view there. C.C. Alvord may have picked a dud of a place for a mine, but he picked a place with a fantastic view. Oh, and I finally found the guy who belonged to the backpack. He was fishing quietly on the south shore.
So, about the mine…
In researching it, I was a bit confused at first. I found one reference that said it was a copper mine, another said it was silver and lead, and a third said gold. I had just assumed that it was gold. In the end, it was all of the above. Sort of.
It started with silver. The Rocky Mountain News said it was an outcropping of an enormous silver ledge that would keep a hundred thousand men mining for generations. The News was a bit off. Next to the deep shaft, Alvord built a bunkhouse for the crew, a blacksmith shop, and a stable for the horse that spent its days powering the mine’s hoist. I didn’t see anywhere how big the crew was, but I suspect it was maybe 99,990 short of a hundred thousand.
Over a five-year period, the mine did okay. Alvord expanded the operation with a tunnel downslope from the shaft (which I didn’t look for) and added another blacksmith shop there. But the mine was very close to a stream, and water constantly seeped into it. The whole operation was shut down in 1880. In addition to the streams, I’m sure there are many springs. There’s a small spring right on the trail a bit before reaching the ledge the mine sits on.
Twenty years later, the mine was promoted as being a huge copper source, the biggest in the region. The promoters put together a glossy 32-page brochure and sold 3 million shares at a dollar apiece. I can’t help but wonder if somebody from the News helped out with the brochure. When extending the tunnel they somehow managed to make a U-turn, blasting out of the mountain not far from where they started. Three million dollars was a lot of money in 1900, and I’d be amazed if they spent anywhere near that in their efforts.
Friday was a short day. We were all packed up and ready to go by 8 am. We could have hung out up there for an additional while, but, frankly, I was looking forward to a shower. Sweat, sunscreen, and bug spray would make a terrible cologne. And did I mention the mosquitoes?
I was a bit amused by questions from many of the hikers we encountered on our way out. At least three times I was asked if we camped. I think it’s pretty obvious that we camped: if you’re not camping, why would you be carrying a big backpack?
My other favorite type of question is along the lines of “Did you make it all the way?” or “Did you make it to the lake?” All the way to where? To which lake? There are a number of destinations on this trail: Calypso Cascade, Ouzel Falls, Ouzel Lake, Bluebird Lake, and some more beyond the trail’s end. I guess people get focused on where they’re going and assume everybody is going to the same place.
Because I keep track of when I get to each navigation point, I always have a pretty good idea of how long it’ll take me to get back to the trailhead. Sometimes, the last half hour of the hike out can be a mental struggle. Time seems to stretch. Particularly on the third day of hiking, I’m pretty fatigued. I just keep telling myself to put one foot in front of the other. This time, thinking I’d just about gotten back to the parking lot, a large group of young kids was hiking in. They were singing 99 Bottles of Beer. I’ve hated that song since junior high school, but it cheered me up. They were on 71, so I knew I only had 29 bottles of beer to go before I was finished!
More Visuals
I didn’t take any pictures on the hike out. So here are a couple more slideshows. The first is some of the flowers I came across over the three days.
Columbine
Elephant Heads (Elephantella)
Indian Paintbrush
Some sort of Gentian? Very small, found above 12,000′
Found in the tundra above 12,000′
Found above 12,000′
King’s Crown
More flowers, but with pollinators!
Readers who have been paying attention may be wondering if there’s a missing timelapse video. It’s not missing, I’m just spreading them out. This is the second angle I shot sitting at Bluebird Lake the first afternoon.
Dam History
As I said in an earlier entry, the dam at Bluebird Lake was removed in 1989-90 when they airlifted out five million pounds of concrete and reinforcing steel. I couldn’t help but wonder how they got the five million pounds in there. (Yes, I know they didn’t bring that much in. They’d have sourced the water, sand, and aggregate on-site.)
Concrete is cement, water, sand, and aggregate. What machines do you need to build a concrete dam there? How many men were on the crew? How do get all the men and materiel up there without a road? For Sandbeach Lake, they built a road and there are stretches of trail today where you could easily drive a two-wheel drive SUV. There’s nothing road-like on the hike to Bluebird.
Back in 1922, the lead engineer on the project wrote a small article for an engineering magazine – just a few paragraphs – about transporting materials to the dam site. The dam had a structural height of 58 feet and a hydraulic height of 55 feet. It was nearly 150 feet long.
The engineer tells us that they can only work between July 14 and September 10 and that it took three years. He also mentions that everything had to be transported six miles, which tells me the trucks were being unloaded at the current trailhead, or the old cabin or thereabouts.
There was no sand on site, so they needed a rock crusher and an automobile engine to run it. They took these machines apart and hauled them up on burros. Each season they had to transport two thousand bags of cement, on burros. And they needed the rebar. This was tied in bundles and a bundle was attached to a wagon axle, the other end dragging on the ground. The axle was drawn by a team of four horses and the driver balanced on the axle.
Each burro carries two bags of cement. The season is 56 days, which means an average of 36 bags a day, or 18 burros. (Presumably, these are 50-lb bags. They probably didn’t carry more than a hundred pounds each.) The rock crusher engine needs fuel, so more burros carry cans of gasoline.
We don’t know how big the crew was, or where they stayed. Did the crew commute the twelve-mile round-trip every day, or did they have a camp on-site? If they camped, the tents and field kitchens needed to go up each season, and food and other supplies for the duration. And they’d have needed to have a latrine on-site.
In any event, every day for fifty-six days a year, give or take, you’d have round-trips for a four-horse team, twenty or twenty-five burros and their muleskinners (or whatever the proper term is for burros), and an unknown number of men.
I don’t know anything about burros, but I imagine they can go where I can go. But I’m doubtful about that four-horse team dragging a wagon axle. At least not above where our campsite is, not where the trail is today.
The dam (originally named Arbuckle #2) was built as an element of Longmont’s irrigation system, as were the several other dams that used to be in the Park. They were all removed in the aftermath of the Lawn Lake flood. Parts of the berms are still standing at Lawn Lake and Sandbeach Lake. Those lakes, as well as Pear Lake, all still have obvious bathtub stains.
At Bluebird, when you stand a short distance from the inlet on the north side and look back to where the trail dumps hikers onto the shore of the lake, you can see where the dam used to be. It’s been gone 32 years. Why isn’t there a more noticeable bathtub ring?
The Bluebird Lake dam was inspected a week after Lawn Lake failed. The water level was forty-two feet below the top of the dam, or just under fourteen feet deep at the lower outlet. The dam’s lower outlet was six feet below the lake’s original outlet. That may or may not be where the current outlet is, but it can’t be far. The upper outlet was larger, near the center of the dam, twenty-five feet below the crest. So, in 1982, the lake was only eight feet above its level before the dam was built. It must have been that empty for a long time before 1982.
Which evidently was a good thing. The inspection report stated that the thin mortar on the faces and crest was spalled off over extensive areas. “Lift lines” are the horizontal lines between the layers that occur between concrete placing cycles. There was significant erosion on the downstream face along the lift lines and the lift lines were probably unbonded.
As well, the concrete in the structure was poor compared to other similarly constructed dams of the same time. A pocket was found on the upstream face that was twenty-one inches deep. Several places tested with a geologist’s pick showed very little cementitious material. In places, the plum stones (those up to nearly a foot in diameter) were too numerous and placed closer to the face than allowed by the specifications.
The city of Longmont sent men out every year to clean the outlet, which had a tendency to collect a buildup of material. The city said the lower outlet had been inoperable in 1974. At the time of the inspection, the upper outlet had been dismantled: missing the drive gear, shaft, and crank assembly.
If the dam was in such sad shape in 1982, why wasn’t it taken out before? Today, concrete dams must be inspected every 3-5 years. I don’t know if it was different fifty years ago, or if, because of the low water level, it was considered out of commission and didn’t require inspections. I can only surmise that, with the water level not much higher than it was originally, it was felt that the danger of failure was minimal and that Button Rock Reservoir could handle it. But I find it hard to believe its general condition was not well known.
It’s unfortunate I never hiked there when the dam was still standing. I’d been as far as Ouzel Falls in the 80s, but at the time, I considered a twelve-mile roundtrip hike out of my range. Ah, my “misspent youth”.
I would say I woke up around 6:00 but that wouldn’t be exactly true. The reality is that I never really got back to sleep after my attempt at astrophotography. I did get some sleep, but for the most part, I just tossed and turned. So it goes.
After breakfast, Gordon and I hit the trail a few minutes before eight. The trail only goes as far as Bluebird Lake, where we arrived in less than half an hour. Yesterday, while sitting on the shore of Bluebird for hours, I pointed out to Gordon the route I used to reach Pipit Lake several years ago and made some suggestions as to how we should attack Isolation Lake.
First, we cross the outlet. Step over three or four rocks in the stream, then climb a crack in the rock on the other side. Even though I did this round-trip when I hiked solo to Pipit, I knew I’d have a little heartburn over the descent back down the crack on the return trip. I’ve done it before, I know I can do it again, so why do I let it bother me? If this is my biggest problem for the day, I’m okay with that.
On the north shore of Bluebird is a rather large talus field. We crossed this fairly high up the slope and continued to climb on the other side, staying to the north of where Pipit hikers would go. We were essentially aiming for a spot a couple of hundred yards north of Lark Pond (which we couldn’t yet see) while trying not to get into any of the patches of willow that are in our path. We had soon reached a flatish bench and past any terrain we could see yesterday from Bluebird.
We weren’t entirely able to avoid all the willow and had to power through a few yards of the nasty stuff before coming out on the next bench. Before long, we were at the foot of a rather steep climb across another talus field. Gordon and I took different routes. I think his involved quite a bit more talus than mine. I think the talus could be avoided by swinging farther to the south and that might be an easier route, if a bit longer.
Isolation Lake sits a few feet below 12,000′, about 300′ below the saddle between Isolation Peak and Mahana Peak. The lake is not very large, a bit less than two acres. We paused here for about fifteen minutes, which I spent mostly gazing at the slope we’d need to climb to continue on to Frigid Lake. We’d climb the three hundred feet to gain the saddle and any route would involve a slope angle exceeding 35 degrees. That might not sound too bad to many people, but it’s about as steep a slope as I want to climb. Not so much for the climbing bit as for the descending bit.
Greeting the hiker upon gaining the saddle is a very dramatic view of the mountains to the north. In the near distance is Tanima Peak, just over a mile away as the crow files. Tanima is dwarfed by the mountains to the north: from left to right (west to east) are Mount Alice and Pilot Mountain, Chiefs Head Peak, Longs Peak, and Mount Meeker.
The slope down the north side of the saddle is somewhat gentler than what we just climbed. It’s a nice stroll across tundra, until the next talus field. Descending across the talus, the slope continues to steepen slowly, revealing that we’d soon need to skirt around a snow field. Grassy bits become few and far between. The final descent to Frigid Lake is down from a small ridge that skirts the south side of the lake. It’s more talus.
It was now nearly noon. We’d been hiking for four hours, mostly off trail, all of it at high elevations, and the last few yards down to the lake are talus. I capitulated. I found a nice comfy spot to take a break and have a snack. Gordon continued down to the shore of the lake. Purists might suggest that because I didn’t dip my feet in the lake, I hadn’t really visited it. I say I was close enough, purists be damned.
I dug through my backpack to find that I somehow managed to leave the GoPro in the tent, so no timelapse video from either Frigid or Isolation. Oops.
After about half an hour, I whistled to Gordon that I was heading back. Gordon is a much faster hiker than I am. No matter how much of a head start I take, he always catches up to me in short order. This time, he caught me by the time I got to the little snow field.
In my planning, I couldn’t help but note that from the top of the saddle between Isolation Peak and Mahana Peak that the summit of Mahana is only three hundred feet higher and it can be reached by making a short detour without dealing with any steep slopes. I have no doubt Gordon could have done it quickly and easily, but it’s a bit too much for me to do both Frigid Lake and summit Mahana. I’m not particularly disappointed that I didn’t even think about summiting Mahana when I was so close.
Just before reaching Isolation Lake on our return trip, we spotted a trio of bighorn sheep ewes. This is only the second time I’ve seen bighorn sheep in the park. Previously it was a large herd of ewes and yearlings and they were a couple of hundred yards away. These three were much closer. We watched them for a few minutes. At first, two of them would keep an eye on us while the third grazed. In the end, they must have figured we weren’t a threat and paid no more attention to us.
Our second break at Isolation Lake was about an hour long. The weather didn’t look too threatening, which can be a risky line of thought here below the Divide. Even with the extended break, I was still feeling the effects of climbing up and down the mountain at more than two miles above sea level. I do fine at nine or ten thousand feet, but above tree line it’s a different story.
The trip back to Bluebird was fairly straightforward. We didn’t exactly follow our route up but managed to again avoid most of the willow. Couldn’t avoid the talus, though, which was really wearing out my legs.
After a short break at Bluebird, I headed down to our camp for nourishment. And a beer. (Today’s beer was a repeat: Left Hand Brewing’s Wheels Gose Round, a delicious sour gose made with raspberry and lemon.)
Bluebird Lake and Me (photo credit: Gordon)
Isolation Lake
Tundra fungus
Mount Alice, Chiefs Head Peak, Longs Peak, Mount Meeker
Frigid Lake
Frigid Lake
What Are Ewe Looking At?
On the Beach
Isolation Lake
Isolation Lake and Mahana Peak
Columbine and Mahana Peak
Back at camp meant back in mosquito central. In that regard, the evening was a repeat of yesterday. Gordon had a bit of fun with it, though. He noticed that the corpse of one of the mosquitoes he had killed had been carted off by an ant. He dispatched fifteen or eighteen more blood-suckers and piled their remains where the ant had found the first one. Had he done this closer to my tent I might have worried I’d have to deal with a line of ants.
Having missed the opportunity to record timelapse videos at the lakes, I ran the camera to see what sort of results I might get by shooting the rugged northern flank of Copeland Mountain. As we had last night and all afternoon, there were some clouds. But they pretty much cleared up right at sunset, so I set an alarm so I could have another try getting a Milky Way shot. Unfortunately, at 11:30 I woke up to high, thin clouds and got right back into the tent.
I’ve been planning this backpacking trip for several years now. The idea is to reach both Isolation Lake and Frigid Lake. It may be possible that I could reach Isolation Lake on a day hike, but after my visit to Eagle and Box Lakes (reached from Thunder Lake), I decided that Foster’s route to Frigid Lake would not work for me. The answer, I decided, was to camp at Upper Ouzel Creek and try to reach both lakes from there.
In fact, I made the attempt a few years ago. It was not well thought out. I somehow decided that a trip in the first week of July would work just fine. There was so much snow. I was able to pitch my tent on dry ground, but the campsite featured several snowdrifts. I didn’t even make it to Bluebird Lake that time, let alone another thousand feet of elevation to Isolation. Needless to say, I took a bit more care in choosing when to make another attempt.
I keep telling myself that, on one of these trips, I’ll try to get a photo of the night sky: the Milky Way. When selecting my dates, though, I don’t give any consideration to the lunar calendar. This time I got a bit lucky. The moon would be in the first quarter and would set not long after the sun. So for this trip, I’ll bring the tripod. It’s an extra four pounds. And, while I’m adding extra weight, why not bring the critter cam? What’s one more pound?
Wednesday, August 3
Gordon decided to join me on this trip and I managed to talk him into driving. I told him that our first day’s hike wasn’t long so we didn’t need to get an early start, but I was concerned about getting a parking spot at the trailhead. The timed-entry passes are in effect for Wild Basin, but only after 9 am. However, I’m sure the parking lot fills up well before then. So it was an early start nonetheless. We arrived a bit before 7:30 to find plenty of available parking.
I’ve described the route to Bluebird Lake in earlier posts, so I won’t repeat myself.
I think I first hiked this trail back in 2008 or so. That would have been thirty years after the Ouzel fire. There’s a section of trail that runs along the top of a ridge above Ouzel Falls to the junction with the spur trail to Ouzel Lake. This section of trail was a bit of a two-edged sword: with no trees, the open views of all the surrounding mountains are impressive, but with no shade, the hiker is subject to the merciless sun.
Today, though, I was struck by how much the trees have grown in the last few years. The once open view is getting closed in. The vast majority of young pine trees are more than six feet tall now. Our two-edged sword is no more: the trees block the views but don’t provide any shade. So it goes.
The Upper Ouzel Creek campsite, by my reckoning, is about a third of a mile below Bluebird Lake. The trail signs indicate it’s farther. It’s a steep third of a mile, though, gaining nearly four hundred feet. I think my favorite part of the trail to Bluebird is a steep section just above the campsite. Maps of the area don’t indicate any switchbacks, probably because they’re too close together to show. Those switchbacks carry the hiker up a slope carpeted with wildflowers. The whole rainbow is represented: yellow flowers make up the majority, but there are red, orange, blue, indigo, and violet flowers, too.
We arrived at our campsite just as the prior occupants were packing up. They were there to fish; they stayed two nights and dipped their lines in both Bluebird and Ouzel, but no luck at Bluebird.
Having arrived at our destination before noon, we had plenty of time to kill. We were done setting up camp and eating lunch by 1 pm and so headed up to Bluebird to sit and relax and watch the world go by.
I was a bit surprised to see several hikers reach the lake after we did. One group, a family of four, stayed at Bluebird until about 4 pm. I guess because I have an hour-and-a-half drive home after my hikes, I want to be back to the car no later than 5 or 5:30. Those folks, if they kept up a good hiking pace, wouldn’t be back to the trailhead until 8 pm.
We hung out at the lake for nearly four hours. The weather seemed to be threatening: the white, puffy clouds grew bigger and darker but we never got more than a few sprinkles. Down the valley, though, it looked at times to be raining heavily. Without wind, it would have been comfortable in shirtsleeves, but it was breezy enough to warrant putting on a jacket.
I’m generally at these alpine lakes for no more than an hour, generally around noon. Being there a bit later and for an extended time I enjoyed watching the shadows change on the surrounding mountains. I ran the GoPro from two different positions, watched a little pika navigate through and around the rocks trying to avoid us humans, and investigated the nearby flora.
Gordon found some remnants of the dam that used to be here. I told him that I’d read about the removal of concrete. I was thinking I’d heard that 1,100 tons of concrete had been removed but was unsure of the number. It’s actually five million pounds of concrete and rebar. That’s 2,500 tons. They airlifted it out in 1989 and 1990 (well before my first visit here). I can’t help but wonder how they got that much material up here. There’s nothing like a road, or the remains of a road, and the dams in the area were all built around the turn of the twentieth century. The material sure wasn’t airlifted in. More on this topic later in another post.
Wild Basin Squall
Pika
Mahana Peak and Bluebird Lake
Backcountry Charcuterie
Night Sky
Had I given it any thought, I might have taken my dinner with me to the lake. As no forethought was involved, we had to return to camp for dinner. The breeze we had at the lake was absent at camp. Normally, this is a good thing. But not tonight. We were besieged by mosquitoes.
I sprayed a liberal dose of repellent on all my exposed skin. This was only a partial solution. Before long, I applied a second coat and sprayed my clothes as well. These measures made it so the little buggers didn’t land on me, but it didn’t keep them away from me. From our arrival back at camp until dark, when I retreated to the tent, there were never less than a couple of dozen mosquitoes buzzing within twelve or fifteen inches of my head. While eating, I had to be careful not to ingest one accidentally. These mosquitoes were relentless.
Today’s beer was a Colorado Native Palisade Peach tart ale. Delicious.
Until dark, I kept a close monitor on the cloud situation. Several times it seemed like the clouds were finally breaking up, only to have another batch of them appear over the divide. By dark, I decided that the sky would soon enough be cloud-free, so I set an alarm for 11:30. I figured the quarter moon would be down by then, the skies would be clear, and I’d be able to try my hand at astrophotography.
I was in luck: the skies had cleared. At least, I think they did. There may have been some high, thin clouds in the east. I had a couple of suggestions for exposure settings. I tried them, and a few others. It took only a few minutes, and I was back in the sack before midnight.
But I never really got back to sleep.
Finally, here’s the first timelapse of the trip:
The Data
I’ve been recording how long it takes me to hike from point A to point B for quite a while. I share the timetables so somebody else might be able to get a clue how long it might take them. In the table below, for example, someone who has gone to Ouzel Falls but not to Ouzel Lake can compare how long it took them to reach the falls to my time. Whether they were faster or slower to the Falls, they can extrapolate a time for the hike to the lake. Also, next time I hike any of these sections of trail, I’ll have a good idea of how long it’ll take.
Location
Arrive
Depart
Trailhead
7:25 am
Campsite shortcut
8:00 am
Calypso Cascade
8:14 am
Ouzel Falls
8:45 am
9:09 am
Bluebird/Ouzel trail jct
9:21 am
Ouzel trail jct
10:12 am
Campsite
11:40 am
Arrival time and departure time are the same where no departure time is given
It didn’t really occur to me that I could use times from one hike and forecast how long it might take me to do another hike. Certainly, there are many factors. How steep is the trail? Am I carrying a backpack or a day pack? What’s the elevation? Am I on a trail or bushwhacking? How long was I hiking prior to a specific section – how fatigued am I?
There is no shortage of stunning scenery in Rocky Mountain National Park. I’d even say that that sentence is a bit of an understatement.
My loquacious nature shows up regularly on the trail when I have brief encounters with other hikers. In the back-and-forth of “where are you headed”, “where are you from”, and so on, it often comes up that I’ve traveled extensively through the Park. And, so, it’s only natural that I often get asked what’s my favorite place to visit.
It’s a surprisingly easy question to answer: Black Lake. Specifically, climb up the inlet stream two or three hundred feet of elevation. The views there are tough to beat.
There are eight named lakes in Glacier Gorge. In my misspent youth, when I thought you could only visit places that had official trails, I repeatedly visited Mills Lake, Jewell Lake, and Black Lake. On one visit to Black Lake, we saw the trail that climbs alongside the inlet stream. We explored a bit, with the payoff being the fabulous views of Black Lake, McHenry’s Peak, and all the rest.
I’ve now visited all eight of the named lakes, plus the unnamed lake commonly called ‘Italy Lake’. Actually, I’ve been to all of them at least twice. Except for Frozen Lake, which I’ve only been to once before.
My first visit to Frozen Lake was back in July 2012, with Ed. This was just a few months after a microburst devastated a section of Glacier Gorge, knocking down thousands of trees. We had to crawl over, under, and around downed trees. I’m pretty sure they had the trail back in shape by the end of that summer. It was a very interesting hike at the time. Tree roots tend not to go very deep in these parts, and when a tree is knocked down like they were, the trunks don’t break at ground level: instead, the tree is knocked over with a large disk of roots, rocks, and soil still attached to the base. I think some of those knocked-down trees are still alive, living off their root disk.
Anywho, it’s time to make another trip to Frozen Lake.
Thursday, July 21
For this visit, I obtained a timed-entry pass good between 5 am and 7 am. Gordon joined me, saying that he wanted to be back by 6 pm. I told him that was doable, but might be tight. I said that if we left my place by 5:30 we’d enter before 7 and, parking at the park-and-ride, we’d put boots on the trail by 7:30. I reckoned that if we stayed at the lake for only half an hour, we could make it back to my house by 6 pm. So that was the plan.
We were off to a rocky start when Gordon showed up at my place with a flat tire. We might make it back here by 6, but it’d probably take him a while to get going. Oh well.
Arriving at the Park, we queued up in the line of cars headed up the Bear Lake corridor. The line this week was longer than last time I was here, a couple of weeks ago, for my Sky Pond hike. That time, there were two rangers checking passes. This time there was only one, and the line we found ourselves in was roughly twice as long as last time. Also, last time I wasn’t asked if I had a day pass. I didn’t, and my annual pass had expired. This time I did get asked. I said I have a Senior Pass, but she didn’t demand I produce it.
I know it takes me almost exactly an hour to get to Mills Lake from the Glacier Gorge parking lot/trailhead. I’m not as sure how long it takes to get to Black Lake from there, or how long it may have taken me to get to any of the lakes above Black Lake. I estimated that it would take an hour and a half to get from Mills to Black and another hour and a half to get to Frozen. So I was quite pleased to see that we reached Mills in a few minutes less than an hour, and Black in about an hour and a quarter. So we were already a bit ahead of schedule.
This summer, I’ve taken to using my trek poles. I bought them when I bought my snowshoes. I used them once or twice but wasn’t very happy with them. I’m not sure why I decided to give them another try, but here we are. My thinking is, I’d find them useful when I’m off trail, or for crossing streams or navigating talus fields. But I don’t want to use them all the time. I figured out how to carry them on my lumbar pack. Reduced to their minimum length they’re still a bit long: with them on my pack, I’m now as wide as if I were standing with hands on hips, elbows out. I have to be careful passing other hikers on the trail, and if I get into a willow patch I have to take them off the pack.
So, at the base of the climb above Black Lake, I started using the poles. I didn’t really need them until we reached a place where the stream goes alongside a tilted granite slab. These ten feet or so always give me a little heartburn. Not so with the poles.
The trail above Black Lake is pretty easy to follow until you gain the large bench that holds Frozen, Green, and Blue Lakes. At some point, however, you find yourself in a place where you can more or less go whichever way you want, subject to stream crossings and fields of willow. On our way down, we spent more time on what passes for the trail in this area than we did on the way up. I think our route up was a bit easier than the well-traveled trail.
The gist of the hike from the top of the climb from Black up and over to Frozen is a series of large inclined slabs separated by grass or willow. There are cairns throughout the area, generally indicating paths through the willow or leading to the stream crossings. So navigation is pretty simple: just bear to the west of the Spearhead.
The weather was beautiful if perhaps a bit warm at lower elevations. At 11,600′ above sea level, it was about as pleasant as it gets: sunny, warm, not terribly breezy, with mostly clear skies. I was thinking we’d only sit at the lake for half an hour, but before I knew it an hour had passed. (Today’s beer: Avery Brewing’s Electric Sunshine, a tart ale brewed with papaya, pineapple, kiwi, and huckleberry.)
Mills Lake and Glacier Gorge
Ribbon Falls
Black Lake
Longs Peak, Keyboard of the Winds, Pagoda Mountain, The Spearhead
The Spearhead
Longs Peak detail: The Keyhole (at left)
Frozen Lake
Longs Peak and Storm Peak
Frozen Lake
Again, I usually had a fair amount of heartburn descending the steeper bits of the inclined slabs. What can I say? I’m a bit of a weenie. I was much happier having poles, but I was still a bit slow in places. But they did wonders for my confidence.
We could hear voices but didn’t see where they were coming from. I figured they were climbers working up the Spearhead. I stopped a few times trying to spot them but never did see anybody. I also tried inspecting the area around the Keyhole on Longs. The lens I normally use isn’t much of a telephoto, and I didn’t bring a longer lens. I thought I saw some people up there but couldn’t be sure.
One thing I will say: If I had seen this view before climbing Longs Peak, I never would have climbed Longs Peak. From here, it looks to me like one would have to be insane to climb it. It’s not straight up-and-down, but it’s pretty dang steep. And large sections are giant slabs that look to have no footholds or handholds. I have climbed it, though. Let’s just say I was highly adrenalized by the time I got back to the Keyhole. Let’s also say I see no reason to do it again.
The hike back to the trailhead was uneventful. We got sprinkled on twice, very briefly, not enough to even wet the rocks. I was quite surprised at how few other hikers we ran into. Part of that, no doubt, is because we used the Fire Trail. But I expected quite a few people at both Mills and Black. I don’t think we came across more than two dozen people all day.
We did enjoy a close encounter with a cow elk. She was crossing the trail just a few feet in front of me. She was quite habituated to people and didn’t really give us a second thought. She worked across the trail munching on grass and flowers and came within twelve or fifteen feet of us. After we passed, we could hear her whistle. That was Gordon’s description of the noise. It’s not a bugle or trumpet. More like a … bass flute? She was whistling up a storm; we could hear her for quite a distance down the trail.
Even with our extended stay at Frozen Lake, we were back to the car ahead of my original schedule. Traffic wasn’t as bad as I expected and we were back to my place by 5:30. Gordon still had to deal with his flat tire. This was a bit more difficult than we anticipated. His tire iron wasn’t the correct size for his lug nuts, and his jack didn’t lift his truck high enough to get the flat tire off, let alone to get a fully inflated tire back on. Luckily for Gordon, his nephew wasn’t too far away and had a jack he used to lift his lifted Jeep. We got him back on the road not much after 6:30. Typing this, I haven’t heard from him. So I’m hoping he actually made it home without any additional drama.
Except for Gordon’s flat tire, I’d say the day was a success!
According to the United States Geological Survey, a glacier is “a large, perennial accumulation of crystalline ice, snow, rock, sediment, and often liquid water that originates on land and moves downslope under the influence of its own weight and gravity.” I’m guessing, then, that when a glacier shrinks enough, it won’t be massive enough for its weight to overcome friction and it will stop moving and it will no longer be a glacier, but a permanent snowfield.
There are fourteen named glaciers in Colorado. I’d be surprised if all these fourteen are still glaciers by the end of my lifetime.
Isabelle Glacier forms the headwaters of South St. Vrain Creek and clings to the Continental Divide between Apache Peak and Shoshoni Peak in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. The easiest access is from the Brainard Lake Recreation Area.
Tuesday, July 12
Not long ago, Brainard implemented a timed-entry pass system much like that in use at RMNP. Passes are made available two weeks before the date and when I went to pick a date and make my reservation, there were plenty of passes still available for each day in the fourteen-day window. I picked up a pass in the earliest time slot, 5 am to 8 am. I bought a pass for parking at the Brainard Lake picnic area. There are permits available for the small lot right at the Long Lake trailhead, but the early times sell out pretty quickly.
The ProTrails writeup for the hike to Isabelle Glacier says it’s an 8.75-mile round-trip with a net elevation gain of 1,510′. That’s from the Long Lake trailhead, which is about a mile (and 200′ of elevation) from where I parked. I neglected to account for this when I was thinking about how long the hike would take. It turns out, I also didn’t give much credit to the overall steepness of the trip.
I arrived at the parking lot a few minutes before 8 and was quickly on my way. Because I took a somewhat more scenic route from my car to the Long Lake trailhead, it took me half an hour to get there. The trail from the trailhead to the first sight of Lake Isabelle is fairly typical for the area: well-maintained, wide, and busy, through forest. Long Lake is, well, pretty long: about six-tenths of a mile. The valley the trail traverses is wide and for the most part, the trail doesn’t rise much above the floor. The South St. Vrain meanders a bit and forms the usual pools and marshes in the grassy meadows. There aren’t many views through this forested section of trail, although there are the occasional glimpses of Niwot Ridge and the cascades formed just below the outlet of Lake Isabelle.
At Lake Isabelle, there’s a trail junction. Continue straight to see the lake or proceed up to Isabelle Glacier. Take a right turn to head up to Pawnee Pass. One could go that way to summit Pawnee Peak or Shoshoni Peak or to visit Pawnee Lake, but I’m not sure I’m up to any of those. Either peak is about a thousand feet higher than Isabelle Glacier and add a bit of distance. Pawnee Lake is something like 1,600′ below the pass, so you’d be looking at dealing with more than 3,000′ of climbing.
Lake Isabelle is another significant body of water, measuring about half a mile from east to west and spanning the entire width of the canyon. The trail skirts the north shore of the lake, sometimes right at the water level, sometimes navigating through talus fields. For the entire length of the trail, from the Long Lake trailhead to the glacier, the trail is intuitive and easy to follow, except for two or three short stretches of talus.
Just west of the lake, the trail climbs a bit to a rocky outcropping where the stream makes a wide and scenic cascade. Those hikers not up to the challenge of reaching the glacier would find this area a very pleasant place to stop and take in the scenery.
As is typical for hikes through valleys with multiple lakes, the trail is alternately fairly flat and somewhat steep. Each lake sits on a bench, with a short ascent from one bench to another. The bench above Lake Isabelle lacks a lake and instead is filled with a sea of willow. The trail crosses the stream in the midst of the willow. In mid-July, the flow of water is still near its peak, and in addition to the main stream, there are several smaller rivulets to cross. None of these crossings are treacherous, but some are challenging.
After navigating the willow, the trail climbs to the next bench. I met a hiker headed down and asked him if he’d been to the Glacier. He hadn’t. He was stymied by a field of snow. I’d spotted this from below and noted the tracks that ran across it. For today’s hike, I consulted the weather forecast for the area which said we’d see a high temperature of about 70 degrees. I decided to bring a hoodie rather than microspikes. At this point, I was wondering if I made the best choice: even at 10:30, it was about 70 degrees and sunny. And this snow field looked to be fairly steep.
An aside here: For most of my hiking history, I eschewed trek poles. I always figured that on any given hike I might find poles of limited usefulness and therefore not worth the weight penalty. Recently, I’ve been reassessing. I’ve decided that, if I’m going off-trail, I should bring the poles. This hike had no off-trail component, but I figured that poles might be handy on the final steep section. From the trailhead to Lake Isabelle, I carried them on my pack. I relied on them quite a bit for all my water crossings. (Carrying them on my pack makes me wider – they stick out on either end. I’m still getting used to that. I have to account for this in narrow spots.)
The snowfield looked to be about a hundred yards across, with boot prints that went neither uphill nor downhill. When I stepped onto the snow, I decided that spikes wouldn’t have helped much. The snow gets pretty soft when it’s been in the sunshine all morning and I don’t think spikes would have improved traction. But I was quite happy to have my poles with me. This crossing was near the top of this snowfield and a slip might have meant a slide of a couple of hundred feet. But it wasn’t as steep as it looked from below, so I continued.
There’s an unnamed tarn on this bench, only a few yards past the snowfield. Here I met another hiker. He asked if I’d seen anybody else headed this way and told me that he was the only one up here. He said I had about a third of a mile to go, but that it was “straight uphill”. He was quite impressed by the glacier, calling it a “bucket list” item.
Standing on the talus shore of the tarn, it’s a bit intimidating to look at the slope the trail ascends. The trail has many switchbacks and quite a bit of effort went into constructing it. But from below, there’s no sign of a way up.
Usually, when on a treeless slope, it’s pretty easy to see where the trail goes. Here it’s almost as if you’re on a stretch of magical trail. The trail seems to exist for only a short distance ahead and behind. The trail coalesces in front of you from nothing and decays back to nothing behind you.
One of the trail’s switchbacks is next to a falls. There’s not a huge volume of water, but it falls thirty or forty feet straight down and is fairly wide. It doesn’t exactly roar but makes a fair noise. Just as the trail seems to annihilate itself once it’s behind you, the sound of the falls quickly fades to nothing just a few steps up the trail.
After a final stream crossing, the trail dumps you onto a rim of rocks surrounding another tarn, this one full of snow and ice and water. The glacier stretches above and to the west. By surface area, it’s a bit smaller than Lake Isabelle. Not very long ago, some intrepid skier hiked to the top for a single run down the glacier. How badly must you want to ski, to carry your skis as far as I just hiked, then climb another 500-600′ of very steep snow?
There are two or three other tracks in the snow. They’re not made by man or beast, but the tracks of rocks that have fallen from above. When I used to hike to Emerald Lake every Memorial Day, I’d often hear the crack and rumble of falling rocks. Sitting here at the glacier eating my lunch I heard that noise again. I couldn’t help but think of the recent major rockfall in Chaos Canyon, even though I knew it was just a single, small rock.
The scenery is very dramatic. Isabelle Glacier is draped off the ridge between Apache and Shoshoni peaks. Navajo Peak is almost due south and has a smaller, unnamed glacier clinging to its steep slope. Niwot Ridge runs off Navaho Peak nearly due east for a mile and a half or more. My lunch spot was at almost exactly 12,000′ elevation and all the steep, craggy peaks surrounding it rise another thousand feet or so.
When planning the hike, I figured it would only take two and a half or three hours to reach the glacier. In fact, it was more like four and a quarter. I hadn’t accounted for the extra half hour from the car to the trailhead and I clearly didn’t account for this hike being so high. I knew I’d be climbing 1,500′ feet, but I guess I wasn’t accounting for the trailhead being at 10,500′. It took me about 40 minutes to climb from the tarn at 11,400′ to my picnic spot beside the glacier at 12,000′. I never stopped for longer than it took to snap a photo or two, but I wasn’t exactly breaking any land speed records.
I took only a short break at the glacier. My last few hikes were short enough that I had the luxury of stopping where I wanted for however long I wanted. As it was already a bit past noon when I got to the glacier, I had to be concerned with the weather. Being right below the Divide, you can find yourself in a thunderstorm with no warning.
I was back down a bit below the tarn when it started sprinkling. The summits above me were becoming slightly obscured by a white veil: the rain had turned to graupel. This forced me to don my hoodie and by now I was happy to think I’d made the correct choice of the hoodie over the microspikes.
On the hike down from the tarn to Isabelle Lake, I could watch the progress of the rain clouds as they blew to the east. I never got more than a slight sprinkle (and the graupel), but it looked like somebody downwind was getting a good shower.
Just before regaining Isabelle Lake, I ran into a few hikers heading up. None of them intended to try for the glacier. One said something to the effect that Isabelle Glacier isn’t a real glacier. I was about to protest when she said that she used to live in Alaska. Certainly, Colorado glaciers are nothing like Alaska ones, so I could see her point. I told her how much I’d seen Andrews glacier shrink in the last forty years and wondered how much bigger Isabelle was back then.
I took a short break at the outlet of Isabelle Lake. The stream flows under a large snowfield here, that was visible momentarily from the trail below. Clouds obscured the sun and the wind kicked up but I packed the hoodie away and stowed the poles. It took me an hour and a half to get here from the car on my way up, then two and a half hours to get from here to the glacier. Given that I don’t hike down these trails any faster than I hike up them, I figured I could be back to the car by 4:30.
Overall, I found it a most satisfying hike. The section up to Lake Isabelle isn’t very strenuous. Hikers wishing to go no further can find excellent places to take in the views just above the lake. There are scenic cascades and lake views, surrounded by dramatic mountains. And, for those willing and able, Isabelle Glacier is worth a visit.
No time-lapse video for this hike. Instead, here’s a larger-than-usual slideshow.
