Turquoise Lakes

These last few weekends Ali and I have been on a solid hiking schedule so we decided to keep it up. Due to some potential weather issues further north and south, we decided to drive to Beaver Creek Resort for this hike.

The trail head is technically called Beaver Creek Trailhead and it's quite different from your average start point. We parked in the Gerald Ford parking garage and then walked up to the bottom of lift 10 where the trail technically starts. From here, if you look up the mountain to your right, you can see a maintenance shed and a few signs that lead towards Beaver Lake and the Five Senses Trail. This trail will go past some maintenance sheds, small creeks, and a very rich neighborhood until you finally get outside of the official resort and start your uphill trek to Beaver Lake.

The hike to Beaver Lake is a little under 3 miles but it's a solid uphill trek. Luckily the path is fairly shaded and you follow a creek the majority of the time so it was a nice change of pace from our 14er last week. This part of the trail can get fairly busy as families go to Beaver Lake a lot but once we moved past it, we only saw one other person all day. Below is a picture of Beaver Lake.

After you get past Beaver Lake, the trail takes a more wooded/gradual uphill route than the first part. You continue weave around a river the majority of the time which is very pretty and offered some good background noise. About 5 miles into the hike you start to come across quite a few valleys as well that look like a perfect location for deer/moose but unfortunately we only saw one deer all day.

The picture below is ~.25 miles from Lower Turquoise Lake and ~1 mile from Upper Turquoise Lake. We started to see a lot of wildflowers around this area which was very pretty.

Below is a picture of Upper Turquoise Lake. Overall it was a pretty nice lake but unfortunately the wildfires were fairly bad and there was quite a bit of smoke/haze in the air which made some of the views not as clear as usual.

All-in-all I really enjoyed the hike. As I mentioned previously, it was a great change of pace after doing a 13er and 14er the last few weeks. This trail was very wooded and had a lot of water with creeks and 3 lakes. We ended up hiking ~15.5 miles in total with around a 3,000 elevation gain. So it was definitely a long hike but since the elevation was lower, it didn't feel nearly as bad.

Pikes Peak

Since Ali and I knocked out a 13er last weekend, this weekend we decided to hit up a 14er. After doing some quick weather research, our best chance to not get wet was down south, so we headed to Pikes Peak.

There are a few different ways to hike Pikes Peak but the easiest day trip I could find (other than obviously driving it), was via Crags Trail. According to All Trails, this is 12.6 miles long with a lovely 4,468 elevation gain. My Gamin had is at 14.29 miles but it tends to shoot high from time to time.

As soon as you start this trail, it's a solid uphill climb. The first few miles are in and out of the woods until you get above the treeline and have a fairly sucky push uphill in the sun to Devil's Playground. There is one fairly long ridge before getting to the Playground that levels out some and gives you a nice view of Pike's Peak as well as Mueller State Park to the west.

Once you get past that ridge, you have to cross the Pike's Peak Tollway and then continue the trail on the east side. There are parts of the trail that run right beside the road which isn't ideal but then other sections that veer off and gives you some good views. The picture below is Pike's in the distance.

The final stretch of the trip is zig zagging back and forth between a fairly large boulder field. You had to do some scrambling but it wasn't bad at all. Once you get past that, you are afforded a lovely view of 50+ vehicles where people drove up and a lot of construction.

Overall it was a pretty tough hike since you were going uphill constantly and it was fairly high elevation. I'm glad we did it but it definitely wasn't one of my favorite hikes due to how many people were on the trail and having to deal with the road/traffic at the top of the mountain. 

Arapaho Glacier Trail

This summer has been pretty busy with random weekend activities so we haven't gotten up to the mountains as much as we want. Luckily we both had the 4th of July aka "Murica Day, off so we decided to get away with a long hike. The hike that we picked was Arapaho Glacier Trail via Rainbow Lakes Trail head. This trail head is about 30 min northwest or Nederland. The first part of the drive is very easy with nice paved roads but the last few miles is bumpy/rocky gravel. It's not terrible by any means, but it's definitely bumpy.

The trail itself starts out with a 2 mile section through the woods. This section keeps a fairly consistent uphill slope and was probably my least favorite part of the hike since there were no views. Once you get out of the woods into the rolling mountains/tundra, you have a view of North Arapaho Peak and the Boulder Watershed.

You are in a fairly exposed section of the trail gradually working your way up switchbacks on both rides of the ridge. Until you cross over to the south side, you are constantly going up but the other side levels off a little until you get to South Arapaho Peak. This section was very pretty as you could see multiple lakes, the peaks, tons of wild flowers, etc. Then you cross over to the south side and you get better views of snow capped mountains, the 4th of July trail head, and other lakes. I would just recommend watching the weather closely as you don't want to get caught in a storm out there. There is no cover at all and you are at ~12,000 feet. We luckily had good weather but it was pretty windy on the north side.

After about 6.3 miles in, according to my Garmin, we got to the overlook of the glacier. It's fairly similar views of the watershed you had on the way up but you get a lot better look at the sheer size of the peak and the glacier itself.

From there it was a short but fairly vertical hike up to the top as you can see from the pictures above. At the top, we were around 13,356 on the south peak and the north peak was a few hundred feet taller but we didn't do it. After the glacier overlook, there was a "trail" but it was quite a bit of scrambling to get up but nothing technical at all. This was by far my favorite part of the hike.

All in all, my GPS said we ended up going 13.96 miles after doing some random walking out and taking pictures. I would highly recommend this hike to anyone as the views were pretty solid the majority of the hike. The Rainbow Lakes Trail head also wasn't very busy at all but the peak was due to the 4th of July Trail head only about about 3 - 4 miles from it.