The impressive looking mountains you see ahead as you
descend from the Eisenhower Tunnel when heading west from Denver are part of
the Gore Range, a rather small range of the Rockies that runs northwestward
from I-70 near Frisco and Copper Mountain to the Colorado River’s Canyon and
forms the border between Eagle County and northern Summit County . While it has
some attractive looking peaks, I tended to ignore them in the era when bagging
summits was my usual goal in favor of the fourteeners in some of Colorado’s
other ranges.

Now that I’m older and chubbier I am less adamant on a
mountaintop as a goal and have gone on a few beautiful hikes in the Gore Range.
I was very interested in a 12-mile loop hike in the Eagle’s Nest Wilderness in
northern Summit County I read about in my Summit County Hikes guidebook. Twelve
miles is a good long distance that will take a full day but is not as strenuous
nor quite as high altitude as actually climbing a mountain. And the beautiful
thing about a loop hike is that it’s all new territory through the day instead
of repeating what you already saw in one direction on the way back.

The turnoff for the hike is on the south side of Green
Mountain Reservoir about 15 miles north of Silverthorne. It was probably another
three miles or so on a graded dirt road to the parking lot at the trailhead
just below Cataract Lake . I decided to hike the trail in the recommended
counterclockwise direction.

It turned out to be a long a quite strenuous hike, one I
could have made longer with a few short side trips to lakeshores. The scenery
was spectacular and varied, very different from that when climbing a peak, and
especially colorful with the changing aspens and almost cloudless skies.
Despite not climbing a mountain, I suspect I ascended about 2,500 feet from the
trailhead, but many parts of the trail were level or with repeated short ups
and downs rather than the continuous ascent and then descent of a peak climb. I’d
highly recommend the hike to anyone looking for a long day hike in remote
country where few other hikers go.