Beaver Reservoir to Coney Lake

Drive & Parking
From the west side of Denver it's a little under 1.5 hours. Assuming you go early enough in the morning, the drive up and through Boulder isn't bad at all. Once you go west on James Canyon Drive, you may get stuck behind some slow traffic as you wind through the mountains.

Parking was kind of weird since there are a lot of camp grounds around there and also you will see "Private Property" signs everywhere. We parked right beside the reservoir on the side of the road before the 4x4 trail starts. There isn't a ton of space here so I'd get there early or you'll have to park around the campgrounds and walk further.

Distance
AllTrails says it's around 12.5 but my Garmin marked us as 11.34 round trip.

Elevation Gain
~1,700 feet with a max of ~10,500

Difficulty
There are no technical or super steep portions of this trail. The only difficult part is the distance.

The Hike
Fair warning, the first 2ish miles of this hike sucks. You are basically sharing a 4x4 road with vehicles and there isn't much to look at. Once you reach a little lake/pond crossing, it becomes significantly better as you are getting into a more wooded area and away from everyone else.

You'll hike another few miles that is slightly uphill and start to get some views of the mountains in the background. While this part of the trail is nice, it's the last 1-2 miles that make this trail. As you start to reach the lake, you will start crossing Coney Creek quite a bit and come across some smaller lakes before you reach the top. This entire area is very pretty and secluded.

About .5 miles from the lake, we ran into quite a bit of snow and had to go off the trail for a while. This shouldn't be a major issue as you basically follow the creek and go straight up. Once you reach the top, you'll have a very nice view of Coney Lake.

As we started to take a little break, we saw two very large bull moose start walking over the snow pack in the top right of the picture above. While that was happened, two cow (female) moose were on the opposite side of the lake drinking water.

We watched them for a few minutes until the bulls got about 30 yards from us and continued to keep coming. So we decided it was a good time to go.

Minus the first two miles of this hike, it was really good. We loved all of the streams and lakes towards the top. The fact that we saw 4 moose and a few elk made it that much better. We also only saw a handful of campers at the lake and hardly no one on the trail head when we started.