Lake City, CO - The Heart of the San Juans in Winter

March 31, 2012

Lake City, CO - The Heart of the San Juans in Winter

If you should, in your imagination, put together in one small group, perhaps 12 miles square, all the heights and depths, the rugged precipices and polished faces of rock, and all the sharp pinnacles and deeply-indented crests, and twenty times the inaccessible summits that both of us have ever seen, you would not have a picture equal to this......
W. H. Holmes
letter to Ferdinand V. Hayden from the headwaters of the Rio Grande
September 7, 1876

Donna and I spent a week in Lake City, CO the third week of March for some snowshoeing. We have an old connection to Lake City. Back in the early 1980's (1981 - 1986) we visited here a number of times, winter and summer. We knew folks who lived here and built a log house on an acre of land surrounded by federal land with impressive views of the surrounding peaks. Duane was the USFS forester for the area (they no longer have any USFS staff located in Lake City) for those years. Donna knew his wife Liz through another friend of hers Cathie Faasch (now Wescombe). Donna was returning from her first visit to Lake City the night we met (March 21, 1981). So anyway, after Liz and Duane left, we had not been back in all those years (although I drove through last summer following my backpack on Snow Mesa - see way earlier post if you are interested). Donna met someone in her exercise class that talked about Lake City a few months ago, and we decided to come back for a visit.

Breathtakingly beautiful sums the area up for the two of us, and very quiet in the winter time. Back in the early 1980's, Lake City had only 100 permanent year-round residents - now it is up to a whopping 350-400 year round folks. Lake City mushrooms in the summer though, as the Texans and Oklahomans arrive in droves to jeep the highest elevation jeep road in the country, that connects Lake City with Silverton and Ouray. If you visit this area in the summer, 80% or more of the license plates will be from Texas or Oklahoma. It is a spectacular road to be sure. If you want to visit in the summer and have more quiet, just go hiking (but not to one of the 5 14er's in the area) and you will have the place all to yourselves. It's a cliche that is mostly true - the Texans don't venture off the jeep road, if you can't drive it what's the point.

So how quiet is it in the winter - we snowshoed/hiked on 4 days covering 30 miles and saw exactly one other person. In other words it was our own private paradise. We loved the place we stumbled on to stay at - very inexpensive - we did share it with two other very nice families for one of our 6 nights (thus the picture of the twin boys).

Of course the first two days we were plotting how we could move here or somehow own a cabin - but reality set in by the end of the trip, and instead we are just planning on visiting more often, now that we are retired. We truly loved our week here. Here are pics from our trip.