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.