Hiking on the Fern Lake Trail

story and photos by Dave Rusk

What month is this? August? But it's so cool and moist and green. However, there are signs that we are getting into the latter part of summer. The chartreuse green of spring aspen leaves have darkened to a deep emerald, large and shimmering in the summer breeze, while the tall grass sway with ripening seeedheads. We've watched the transition into late summer wildflowers and the streams losing their torrential flow.

Lately, the weather pattern has brought us a heavy layer of California wildfire smoke, which is a strange mix with the cool moisture. Other than the hazy skies, it feels like an abnormal normalcy for us compared to other parts of the west. Is it even possible we might make it through the rest of the summer without some sort of cataclysmic event?

The Fern Lake Trailhead in Moraine Park

Some time in mid-July, the Park Service opened up the Fern Lake trail past The Pool, having completed some work to make the trail ready from last fall's devastating fire. This being one of the standard hikes in the Park, and knowing that the Patrol Cabin at Fern Lake was lost in that fire, I wanted to see how drastic the landscape had changed. I made the trek at the end of July.

At 6:30 am, it was easy to find a parking spot at the Fern Lake parking lot. With no one on the trail to get ahead of, I started off at leisurely pace. The early morning sun cast long shadows and the light appeared warmer than the air temperature felt giving the tall, green grass a lushness that contrasted with the stark black and brown of the fire damaged pines.

Fern Lake is a moderate 3.8 mile hike. While much of the hike sees a gradual increase in elevation, there is about a mile and a half in the second part of the hike where the trail switchbacks up a north facing slope, with Fern Falls midway up at one of the switchbacks.

In the first 1.7 miles to the Pool, I was impressed by how much green understory growth was growing up through the scorched earth. I thought that perhaps when the fire came through in October, most of this vegetation had already gone dormant for the winter and they were not affected by the above ground fire. They had no clue a fire had swept over them when these plants emerged early in the summer. Ferns and flowering shrubs were still covering much of the ground as they always had.

But once past The Pool, the situation changed. First, the trail travels through an open area that had been caught up in the 2012 Fern Lake Fire. The area was covered with Fireweed. Then the trail begins to gain elevation and it is here that I really began to see the effects from the 2020 East Troublesome Fire.

Spreading Dogbane blooming in the burn area

Once the trail begins its steady climb across the north facing slope, I remembered the shaded spruce and pine woodland environ with sun filtering through onto open forested terrain with a low growing, but rich, ground covering. I remembered how tall and slender the trees were with downed timber rotting and adding organic material to the thin soil. This was a favorite stretch of the trail for me.

Pearly Everlasting

I walked up the slope in silence, overcome by how barren the landscape looked. Charred trees stood with bare branches, devoid of life. The morning sun blasted through, baking the ground. The ground lacked any cover, except for occasional patches of blooming Arnica, their happy yellow flowers loving the sun but seemingly out of place.

Arnica blooming in the burn areas

I make the turn at the first of three switchbacks and follow the trail east and towards Fern Falls. I've been curious to see how barren things would look around one of the Park's few notable waterfalls. The falls were always a fine respite mid-way up this part of the trail with the cool misty spray from the falls refreshing the laboring trail traveler. I feared something of its charm would be gone.

Fern Falls

But as I approached, the trail almost magically returned to its green lushness. It would seem the fast moving fire just simply passed right over this notch in the hillside. While some of the surrounding trees showed signs of heat damage, this spot remained mostly an unchanged oasis. But as soon as I made the turn at this second switchback, I walked right back out into the desolate hillside, as if walking out of a daydream.

Sign warning hikers of the dangers walking through the burn area

Just past the third and last switchback, the trail makes one final push up the hillside before turning north and leveling out. Notchtop Mountain now comes into clear view here through the blackened stand of tall sticks. Walking silently along this last stretch of the trail before reaching the lake, I thought about the storied history of this trail dating back a little over a hundred years ago. This trail is one of many trails in the Park that qualify under the National Register of Historic Places.

The former Fern Lake Lodge

Historic photo

Back in the very early 1900's, tourism was at its beginnings in the region. One of the many projects taken on by the newly formed Estes Park Protective and Improvement Association was constructing a permanent trail to Fern Lake. By 1910, Dr. William Workman was busy building a Lodge at Fern Lake and by the 1920s, the Colorado Mountain Club made annual winter trips to the Lodge. The local newspaper, the Estes Park Trail, reported in March, 1925, that as many as 100 CMC members were showing up for a “ten day frolic in the snow” using the lodge as a base. Ski runs and jumps were reported built for many of these events. That same year, a Park Patrol cabin was built adjacent to the lodge.

But over time, with numerous changes in ownership, it became difficult for the overnight backcountry Lodge to be economically successful. By mid-century, its operation was scaled down to offering lunches for hikers, and then just light snacks. During its last summer of operation in 1958, the Lodge owner hired Peter and Judy Collins to run the operations. This is the Judy Collins whose folk singing career was about to take off. “Our memories float over the spring run-offs and the sunsets and sunrises as hikers take to the mountains to see the Columbines and Paintbrush, the leaping trout and the nutcrackers and Rocky Mountain bluebirds,” Ms. Collins recalled that summer in a 2016 Facebook post. “The Lodge where we worked, I baking bread and pies on a wood stove and slept down on the river bank, are all gone, but the memories live on.”

Musician Judy Collins, performing at Fern Lake Lodge in 1958.

Historic photo

The Lodge closed for good the following year and sat vacant except by vandals before the Park finally removed it in 1976. Only the 1925 Patrol Cabin remained, and now that too was gone, one of the many casualties the Park endured from the East Troublesome Fire last October.

Finally having reached the lake and standing in the very place where the Lodge once stood, I could see how the path of the fire split and pushed around the lake with one leg of the fire coming in from the northwest, engulfing the Patrol Cabin, and then skirting the western shoreline before racing east across the hillside that separated Fern Lake from Odessa Lake and heading up Mount Wuh, leaving the south and east shoreline mostly untouched.

Fern Lake

I decided to hike the additional 0.7 miles to Odessa Lake. Walking through another charred section of the trail, I observed the trail work that the Park described in their Historic Places report as, “some of the largest and most complex rock walls in the park and utilized Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) labor.”

I wandered down to the footbridge that crosses the outlet stream. Standing in the middle, I gazed into the clear mountain water of the little outlet pool surrounded by green vegetation and reflecting Notchtop Mountain above. The view across the lake was a mix of green and brown/black, but still an inspiring view.

Lake Odessa

What a relief when I finally I crossed out of the fire zone and back into beautiful subalpine terrain, walking along a cascading mountain stream with lush green ground cover and green forested hillsides spectacularly framing Notchtop on the path to Odessa Lake. Snacking on the lake shore along with other hikers that had dropped into this paradise on the trail from Bear Lake, I took in the quiet, watching small, wispy clouds float along. This was truly Rocky Mountain splendor.

Dave Rusk has been sauntering and taking photographs through Rocky Mountain National Park for decades. He is the author publisher of Rocky Mountain Day Hikes, a book of 24 hikes in Rocky, and the website of the same name. He is the publisher of HIKE ROCKY Magazine and an important content contributor to all of these endeavors.

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