Rocky Mountain National Park (Part II): Chasm Lake, Ida Peak, plus some bonus hydrology

8/13/09
I took Sunday off, not breaking camp until 9:30 and then driving to get a site at Longs Peak Campground. The Longs Peak trailhead and campground are in their own little section of the park a few miles down Highway 7 from Estes Park. It has a little ranger station but no admission charge. Trailhead parking was swamped, as hundreds of people attempt the trek to the summit of Longs Peak each day. Most are day trippers, though, and I had no trouble getting a campsite. I went back into Estes Park for a shower (hurray!) and some food shopping, and then headed out on a tour of three of the park’s (five) Visitor Centers to gather some information and try and get a better grasp of this place.

Rocky Mountain National Park is a bit of an enigma. It’s a major park certainly, the nation’s tenth, dating back to 1915. While it is comparatively small at 265,770 acres (Yellowstone is over 2.2 million acres, Grand Canyon 1.2 million, Yosemite 748,000, Mount Rainier a comparable 236,000 acres) Rocky Mountain still draws 3.5 million visitors a year, right up there with these larger parks. This is due largely to its location right outside the major metropolitan areas along the Rocky Mountain Front. Longs Peak is an hour from Boulder, an hour forty-five from Denver.

But starting with its generic name, Rocky Mountain seems to lack a distinct identity. It isn’t the class of its region, it doesn’t have any famous geologic curiosities, iconic views, or even an obvious central attraction. At first I was a little frustrated that I didn’t know exactly where to go, what I wanted to see. Gradually I realized that the park’s general lack of focal point could be seen as a strength of the park, providing for the dispersed activity Mount Rainier National Park, for example, seeks so futilely.

Eventually I realized the main feature of the Park is simply its sheer elevation. RMNP is by far the highest national park in the United States, and for once this does not include the routine disclaimer “outside of Alaska”. More than one-third of the Park lies above 11,500’, and 72 peaks rise over 12,000’. It turns out the park’s primary draw is Trail Ridge Road, the nation’s highest paved highway, traversing the park over the Continental Divide. Trail Ridge Road crests at 12,183’ feet and has a Visitor Center as well as many overlooks and strolls. Since I’d been hiking to 12,000 feet all summer I had missed the significance of this. But for people who aren’t strong hikers, it is a unique opportunity to experience the alpine world.

I picked up some practical information along the way. I learned that Timber Creek Campground, the only campground on the west side of the park, would be closing the very next day for ten days. I also learned that the hike to Ypsilon Peak called for an hour drive up a tough dirt road and had no nearby camping, not even backcountry, thus requiring another hours drive after the hike. Not insurmountable logistics, but given all the other choices I had, not sufficiently appealing.

But mostly I wanted to chat with the rangers at the Visitor Centers. I had noticed something interesting about the park’s drainage on the park map. Generally speaking, the Continental Divide runs north-south through the park, so that water to the west of the crest drains via the Colorado River to the Gulf of California and eventually the Pacific Ocean while the waters to the east of the crest drain via the North Platte River to the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. But at the north end of RMNP the Divide has a little fishhook to it, imperceptible on a larger scale but quite obvious on the national park map. As it runs north from Hallett Peak, the divide veers to the northwest toward Milner Pass, then west at La Poudre Pass and the headwaters of the Colorado River, and then south along the crest of the Never Summer Range on the park's northwest boundary before heading southwest and away from the national park.

The upshot of all this, it seemed, was that the east slopes of the Never Summer Range drain into the Colorado River and thus are in the Pacific Ocean watershed while the west slopes drain roundabout to the North Platte River and thus the Atlantic Ocean. I found this interesting and mentioned it that afternoon to two rangers staffing desks at two different Visitors Centers, but to my surprise, neither knew what I was talking about. Following some consultation over the map one of the rangers acknowledged some confusion over the drainage pattern, but the other stuck with unwarranted certainty that the waters draining west from the Park flowed to the Pacific Ocean. Not the most important fact surely, but something to know about a National Park famously situated on the Continental Divide. Certainly if you’re a ranger there! But watersheds and hydrology are currently (ha!) not a hot topic among naturalists. 

Chasm Lake
I headed back to my site at the Longs Peak Campground and found it awash in the blare of pounding amplified dance music coming from the private “Christian“ campground next door. I paid a visit to our campground host, sited much closer to the din than I was, and she said she was helpless to stop it but that it would likely stop by 9:00 PM - she hoped. Nice people, the host and her guests. The music did taper off later in the evening but in its place came communal adolescent screaming. Possibly they were watching a horror movie. They weren’t telling fireside stories or listening for owls, that’s for sure.

Many people at the campground were there to climb Long's Peak. It’s a beast of a hike. The National Park’s website insists IT IS NOT A HIKE, and sometimes someone never does make it back. While only 15 miles round trip, the rangers estimate it takes 15 hours and advise setting off by 3:00 AM to reduce the odds of getting struck by lightning. I heard my campground neighbors set out at 2:00 AM (and they hadn’t returned by 5 that afternoon).

I planned to stick to my general pattern of avoiding the Big Name hikes. I did not hike Mount Whitney or Mount Elwell, and I was not hiking Longs Peak either. I was heading out instead for Chasm Lake, a more sedate hike (8.4RT/2830'/11,760') to a small lake at the base of Longs Peak. At the trailhead I ran in once again to the lovely lady and her family. She was introducing her husband to the ranger. They lived in North Carolina, near Duke University. Her husband taught at Duke University. Her son was hoping to go to Duke University. The older two were her parents. They'd been coming to Rocky Mountain National Park for 15 years. They were all heading home the next day.

Chasm Lake sits at the base of Longs Peak's infamous Diamond, the largest, highest, and steepest mountain wall in the Colorado Rockies. While Longs Peak was first climbed in 1868 (by our old friend John Wesley Powell), the Diamond was not scaled until 1960, after climbers figured out the necessary techniques on Yosemite's El Capitan and then got the Rocky Mountain National Park Administration to lift its ban on the dangerous climb. By the time I got to the lake the sun was high, the light was blinding, and the wall looked much like any other mountain wall since I wasn‘t thinking of climbing it. The lake was also fairly crowded so I dropped down to a lower lake to see what I could see. What I could see was that while Columbine Falls seemed rather modest at the outflow of Chasm Lake, it managed to loom larger in the broader landscape from Peacock Pool.

Longs Peak - The Diamond

Chasm Lake

Chasm Lake

Columbine Falls

Longs Peak

The next morning I broke camp and headed up and over the Continental Divide on the Trail Ridge Road. The landscapes were formidable and, certainly from a paved highway, impressive. I stopped and poked around a few times, but I wasn’t hiking and the irony is that to me the exertion, anticipation and revelation of hiking to the alpine zone are crucial elements of the pleasure. Getting out of the car and strolling about wasn‘t all that much fun. Furthermore it was freezing! Back in the car, I descended toward the Colorado River and ran into a road construction delay where I got my first good look at the Never Summer Range. It was beautiful! Not all that snowy, really, but shapely and with a pinkish tint for relief. That’s where I wanted to hike next.

From Trail Ridge Road

From Trail Ridge Road

Never Summer Range

I drove past Timber Creek Campground and no longer regretted its closing. All the trees were cut down and I’d have been camping in an open field surrounded by piles of slash. I continued south out of the National Park into the Arapaho National Forest and took a spot site at Green Ridge Campground right off Shadow Mountain Lake. I went down to Grandy for errands and came back to the lake to eat dinner at a nearby picnic ground. Some of the picnic area was fenced off to protect an osprey nesting area and only after an embarrassingly long time did I look up and see two huge osprey on a nest just over the fence from where I was eating. The nest was sitting on top of a tree entirely done-in by beetles. It was a huge nest, and mixed nicely in with the dead branches. I wondered if that camouflage was intentional. Actually most of the trees in the area were dead so the birds might not have had much choice.

Shadow Mountain Lake

A third osprey roosted in a tree 50 yards from the nest and made occasional forays over the lake. Then it flew to a tree 50 feet from me. Amid constant chirping and occasional wing-flapping, the male (I believe) of the nesting pair lifted its big bottom up and over the nest edge to let out an impressive fling of excrement. The action was scintillating. Then two interloping osprey entered the scene. One sat in a perch taller than the nested tree and 70 yards away. I wondered if this was social behavior or some kind of threat. Then  - Whoa! - a third osprey swooped down and totally buzzed the nest.

The evening was startlingly lovely. This was the "wet" side of the mountains, in a wet year no less, and it was still pretty damn dry. The slopes of all the visible mountains were brown from beetle attacks. Audubon and Pawnee Peaks sat in the distance. The nesting osprey were now totally focused on the inner nest, and yes I did see some movement down there. I had binoculars in the car but didn't go get them. I am at best a casual birder.

The Grand Ditch
I am a much more intent student of watersheds, however, and the osprey and mountain scenery were competing for attention with my reading of the park literature on the intensive hydrologic development I was sitting in the middle of along the shores of Shadow Mountain Lake near the headwaters of the Colorado River. The Grand Ditch and the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.

When I was sitting earlier in the day at the road construction delay looking out over the Never Summer Range, I could see a gash running across the mountains just below treeline about two-thirds of the way down from the summits. It looked like a road and in fact was a road, a service road for a primitive water diversion system known as the Grand Ditch. There, high up in the headwaters, before it even gets to the Colorado River, water is being taken from the Colorado River watershed for use where people want more water than they have.

Never Summer Range - Grand Ditch

Unlike the development of Washington’s Puget Sound beneath the west slopes of the Cascades, say, or the Provo-Salt Lake City development on the west slopes of the Wasatch Range, greater Denver developed along the east side of the Rockies, in the rain shadow. Where Seattle and Salt Lake City capture water flowing down the mountains in their general direction, the bulk of the water from the Rocky Mountain front flows down the wrong side of the mountains as far as Denver is concerned. They have to go over the mountains to get it and bring it over the continental divide in order to use it.

The Grand Ditch, dating back to 1890, was one of the first such efforts. It’s actually rather elegant. Farmers simply climbed to the low point at the mountain headwaters of the Colorado, 10,175’ La Poudre Pass, and began digging a notch, so that meltwater that had been draining down toward the Colorado River would start flowing the other way, through the notch, and down into the drainage of the Cache La Poudre River, which the farmers were already diverting to irrigate their pastures and fields. And then they just kept extending the notch, ever so slightly uphill (a barely perceptible grade of less than 0.2%) along the contour of the Never Summer Mountains, capturing more and more of the melting snow pack from peaks rising 3000’ above the expanding canal.

It was a gradual effort, done by cheap hired labor with hand tools and dynamite, one year after another. By 1906 the ditch was 8 miles long. Establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915 did not end this private water appropriation. In fact land was taken back from the Park in 1923 to allow construction of Long Draw Reservoir, and in 1936 Congress voted to allow the irrigators to resume work within the National Park and extend the ditch to 14.6 miles, its current length. The ditch is 20 feet wide and 6 feet deep, and diverts between 20 to 40% of the runoff from the Never Summer Mountains, delivering an average of 20,000 acre feet (25,000,000 cubic meters) per year to the Rocky Mountain front, water  used more and more for residential and industrial use and less and less for agriculture.

While the Grand Ditch is a simple technology with water priority, it has legal troubles with the National Park. It diverts water from the park to the detriment of the riparian ecology of the park's Kawuneeche Valley. The National Park has taken legal action to reduce the amount of water the project diverts. Technical difficulties with the Grand Ditch also have immediate impact on national park grounds. In 2003, a breach in the ditch caused an enormous flood, incising the mountainside with a 167 foot-wide, 20-30 feet deep ravine, uprooting or smothering some 20,000 trees. The ditch's owners, Water Supply and Storage Company, subsequently agreed to pay $9 million in reparations.

Colorado-Big Thompson Project

The Grand Ditch is but poetry compared to the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, “the largest transmountain water diversion project in Colorado.” It was begun in the late 1930s, took 20 years to complete, and eventually consisted of 12 reservoirs, 35 miles of tunnels, 95 miles of canals, and 700 miles of transmission lines.

It begins, logically, with Granby Dam, which impounds the Colorado River just a few miles outside Rocky Mountain National Park. Granby Dam creates Lake Granby, the second largest body of water in Colorado, with 40 miles of shoreline and a holding capacity of 539,800 acre feet.

From Lake Granby the water is pumped uphill some 80 to 180 feet depending on water levels to Shadow Mountain Lake, a smaller reservoir sitting at 8367‘ behind Shadow Mountain dam. Shadow Mountain Lake in turn feeds Grand Lake, the only natural lake of the three, and the largest and deepest natural lake in Colorado, but a mere puddle next to Lake Granby. Grand Lake’s natural tributaries flow through the National Park from the Continental Divide and it would have certainly been a part of the park if the Bureau of Reclamation hadn’t put dibs on it first, seeing instead of a pristine mountain sanctuary a prime place to poke a hole through the mountains for irrigation projects along the Rocky Mountains front.

Which is exactly what transpired. Over the objections of the National Park and many conservation groups, but with the support of just about everybody else, Franklin Roosevelt approved the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, the keystone of which was a 13-mile tunnel blasted through the Rocky Mountains thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountain National Park. While primarily an irrigation project, it had the popular appeal of a New Deal jobs program for the Great Depression. But construction did not begin until mid-1940, and when the US entered WWII the project soon faced a labor shortage, so much so that the War Production Board ordered construction stopped for a year or so. But that got cleared up, and the boring was completed four days after D-Day. Water began flowing three years later.

The resulting Alva B. Adams Tunnel, (named after the Colorado senator who officially proposed the project) moves up to 550 cubic feet of water per second from Grand Lake to an outlet on the east side of the Park, not far from my first campsite at Glacier Basin Campground. The tunnel drops 109 feet in elevation between the west and east portal so the water flows by gravity. From the east portal, the water then drops a half mile or so through a series of tunnels and reservoirs, powering 5 hydropower plants along the way, before going on to provide municipal and industrial water for 30 cities and towns on the east side of the Rockies and helping irrigate approximately 700,000 acres of northeastern Colorado farmland. This water augments what the Bureau of Reclamation calls the “native water supplies” of the South Platte River basin. Native water, that‘s a term I’d never heard before.

All told, the project diverts somewhere between 210,000 and 260,000 acre-feet of water each year (over ten times the diversion from the Grand Ditch) from the Colorado River to the east side of the mountains. According to Grand County, 60 percent of its water is diverted from the Colorado headwaters, and if Front Range communities get what they‘re looking for, that could rise to 80 percent of the  headwaters in the near future. The Bureau of Reclamation boasts that enough water is left to maintain the Colorado River as a fine fishing stream. But otherwise…

Unlike the Grand Ditch, the Colorado-Big Thompson Project does not appear to be having any legal difficulties with Rocky Mountain National Park. It diverts the Colorado after it leaves the park, so any ecological impact is not in the park's domain. And whatever fears the early conservationists had of the tunnel influencing underground water drainage to impact above ground lakes and wetlands do not appear to have become manifest, at least not yet.

Mount Ida and Out

I liked the sound of several hikes on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park. The Colorado River Trail follows the rising river some eight reasonably gentle miles past the remains of a 19th-century mining-boom town, through something called Little Yellowstone Canyon, and on to Poudre Pass and the headwaters of the Colorado River. How could I not go there? The same trailhead offered another option of ascending to the Grand Ditch, which I could follow for a few miles before heading up to Lake of the Clouds at the base of 12,797’ Mount Cirrus, one of the stars of the Never Summer Range. I wanted to do that too.

But first I headed off on a nine-mile round trip jaunt along the Continental Divide toward 12,800’ Mount Ida. The trail starts along the Trail Ridge Road at 10,758' Milner Pass, where Poudre Lake, headwaters of the Cache la Poudre River, lay glistening at the trailhead. I hiked past a castellated exposure of pegmatite dikes and then out on a gradual ascent along the Continental Divide. While I was hiking along the Continental Divide, I was not on the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. That shortcuts the fishhook over the Never Summer Range and heads west out of the Park from Flattop Mountain. I never did set foot on that.

Poudre Lake

Pegmatite Dikes

The sun was lovely, the wind was stiff but not punishing, the immediate landscape severe tundra, the major focal point increasingly terrific views of the Never Summer Mountains, and of course the Grand Ditch. The intervening valley forest revealed heavy beetle infestation. I did not go all the way to Ida Peak, stopping instead to dangle my feet from a false summit where the view included Ida Peak. On the way back I was gliding down the continental divide, jacket open in the breeze, feeling just spectacular, when I came upon a couple about my age all bundled up and hunkered down like Scott in Antarctica. I contrasted their discomfort with my sense of well-being and must admit I felt a touch of pride in my vim and vigor. Before the fall and all.

Never Summer Range

Mount Ida

The first chink was quick in coming. I got back to the trailhead parking strip, now crowded with midday visitors. The van next to me pulled out and I followed suit, for about six feet or so, before I heard and felt the nauseating crunch of my car hitting another car. The van had stopped behind me waiting for traffic to clear and I simply did not see it. It was my first accident since 1973. It wasn't even a fender bender. It was a rear- light-protector shatterer. The bulb didn’t even break. But the other driver hopped out and sprang into action like some aggrieved drill sergeant - “I need your license, I need your insurance number“ - really aggressive. It was hot and I was as annoyed as he was and for a while I just went passive aggressive and slowed the transaction down as much as I could. I wanted to muster the equanimity to say “hey, I’m sorry man, I know this sucks but let’s just get through it with dignity”, but the best I could come up with was “you know you’re awfully rude”. He didn’t like that but it didn’t deter him either. But when I finally got a look at his license saw it was from New Jersey I couldn’t avoid a crack about that explaining the rudeness. That really pissed him off, enough to shut him up, and from then on the exchange went smoothly, though I was not feeling any better about myself. 

     

I woke the next morning, my last in Rocky Mountain National Park, to an old friend, the American White Pelican, just a pair here on Shadow Mountain Lake compared to the December swarms at Salton Sea. Two days earlier I had  been thinking of how much more hiking I wanted to do here, but the accident seemed to have rattled my outlook and suddenly I knew it was time to go. I drove into the Park, joined the convoy through the construction zone, and saw my first moose! It was only a partial victory as I was in a line of cars behind the pilot car and had absolutely no way to stop. It was big, leaping gawkily back into the brush, seemingly in response to the oncoming line of cars. Still, it was pretty great. Once liberated I pulled into the Colorado River Trailhead and took a stroll along the wide green upper Colorado valley known here as the Kawuneeche. No moose. No sun either and it felt good. I felt like I was turning to the home stretch of my journey, out of the Colorado drainage and into the late northern summer. I drove over Milner Pass and saw eight bull elk lounging about Poudre Lake.

Kawuneeche Valley

Colorado River

I left Rocky Mountain National Park down Highway 34 along the Big Thompson River and came to the town I thought was Longmont. I drove around in some confusion because nothing was where I remembered it being when I had first come in. Eventually I realized I was not in Longmont but in Loveland, apparently a different city all together.