My friends Donald and Ann Marie Fowler were going to be in
Breckenridge toward the latter part of September, so I decided to meet them for
dinner one evening . Of course, if you’re going to drive that far on a nice fall
day, you must do something in the Colorado great outdoors. A few months earlier
in the summer my former housemate David and I had planned to do a hike across
the Gore Range, but we abandoned the idea because it turned out to be a very
rainy day. So I decided to try the hike later in the season on a beautiful
sunny day after the season’s first snow had fallen a few days earlier.

A difficulty with the hike between Frisco and Copper
Mountain is that it starts and ends in different places, so you need two cars
or……you can hitchhike. So I drove to Frisco, parked at the lot at the trailhead
very close to the I-70 exit at the west end of town where I’d be finishing, and
stuck my thumb up. I got a ride from the first vehicle that passed the traffic
circle to get on the Interstate.

It’s only about 8 miles to the Copper Mountain exit where I
got dropped off and easily found the trailhead on the north side of the
highway . The hike I intended to do has various names but seems to be called
Wheeler Lakes Hike if it’s done as an in-and-out from the Copper Mountain Trailhead.
The trail climbed very gradually through aspen and evergreen forests that
gradually opened to beautiful meadows and a few small lakes near the top. While
I somehow expected it to not be that long a hike since the elevation gain the
direction I was going was less than 2,500 feet. The drop is somewhat greater
because Frisco is at a lower altitude than Copper Mountain.

After a long traverse of meadows and mountain country around
12,000 feet in altitude, the trail dropped down steeply through thick evergreen
forests eventually to Meadow Creek and Lilypad Lake. Meadow Creek runs quite
directly toward Frisco and was relatively flat and easy walk. While the trail
description I had described the route not as a single hike but as two separate
in-and-out hikes, my best estimate is that I walked a quite long 12 miles
across the Gore Range a few miles north of I-70. It was a stellar day, and by
the time I finished I was ready for some dinner and beers with Don and Ann
Marie at the Breckenridge Brewery in Breckenridge.