Colorado River Trailhead

Want to meet the Colorado River while it's still small? The trailhead spur is on your left in about a fifth of a mile, across from the Timber Lake lot, so watch for oncoming traffic. There are vault toilets and picnic tables, and the river is a half-mile walk from the lot, ten minutes or so each way. When you leave, turn left out of the spur. That walk puts you on its bank at about nine thousand feet, at the start of its run through the Kawuneeche Valley. The whole river runs about fourteen hundred and fifty miles. The trail goes on to where Lulu City stood, three point seven miles up, too far for today. Benjamin Burnett laid it out on paper with nineteen streets, four avenues and a hundred blocks, and named it for his daughter. In the summer of eighteen eighty, the wagon road from Fort Collins arrived to the sounds of the city band. Legend says a sign on the stagecoach read, first class passengers ride all the way, second class may have to get out and walk on the pass, and third class will get out and push. The ore was low grade, hauling it cost too much, and by eighteen eighty-five the town was finished. If you've stopped here, a small study plot near this trailhead, fenced against elk and moose, is the clearest picture in this valley of what they've eaten. Outside the fence, the typical willow fell from about five and a half feet in nineteen ninety-seven to about fifteen inches in twenty twenty-one. Inside it, the typical willow grew to more than ten feet. Same river, same sun. The difference is who gets to eat.