It's about 1 hr. from Denver to the trail head. I don't remember all of the details of the drive since we did this a few weeks ago but I know the parking lot was fairly large and we didn't hardly see anyone there. The last portion of the drive is on a gravel road that has some decent rocks/bumps in it.
Distance
AllTrails says 10 miles, my Garmin marked us at 9.77 miles
Elevation
~2,800 ft. gain with a max of ~8,000 ft.
Difficulty
The trail is uphill the entire way until you hit the saddleback in the last mile or so of the trail. There are no technical or very steep portions, it's just a gradual uphill the entire way. I'd say the trail is moderate with a decent amount of distance.
The Hike
To start, I really enjoyed this trail. It followed a creek for the majority of the time and we fairly shaded which cooled things off quite a bit. It's also very peaceful hiking next to running water and with the lack of people on the trail, you could really get away from everything.
As I mentioned on difficulty, the trail has quite a bit of elevation gain on it so you are going uphill the entire time. The good thing is that it's not very steep, just consistent.
After the first few miles you start to break away from the creek and have a switchback going up the mountain. This is the steepest portion but with the switchbacks, it makes it not as bad. As you continue up, you start to break through the trees which gives you a nice view of some rolling mountains in the distance.
Once you get to the top of the mountain, there is a saddleback that gives you a little level/downhill trip to the lake at the top. For a lake in Colorado, it's a pretty basic one that is more of a pond vs. a lake. Nevertheless, it was still pretty and a nice place to rest. Below are a few pictures of it.
If you continue on for another mile or so, you will eventually hit Roosevelt Lake. We actually did this hike the week before but from a different trail head. While I would recommend Tanglewood, Roosevelt Lakes isn't anything special and the loop we did on the northwest side of it isn't worth the hike in my opinion.
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