Ice Lake Basin

Author's Comments

The first time I saw Ice Lake I did not believe the color. I had heard the descriptions and seen other people's photographs and assumed, the way I always assume, that some of it was saturation pushed too far in post. It is not. The lake is genuinely that turquoise, a color that belongs more to the Caribbean than to a glacial cirque at 12,585 feet, and the first reaction is something close to disbelief. The hike earns it. Seven miles round trip and twenty-five hundred feet of climbing, most of it through the lower basin where the wildflowers in late July go absurd - paintbrush and columbine and lupine in densities I have not seen anywhere else in Colorado. I tell people to start at first light, not because the trailhead fills, though it does, but because the afternoon storms in this basin are not theoretical. By two in the afternoon you want to be coming down, not going up. Golden hour at the lake itself is the photograph everyone is after, and it is worth the wait if you can manage the descent in fading light. Vermillion and Golden Horn and Pilot Knob hold the last sun longer than the basin floor, and there is a window when the peaks are still warm and the water has gone deep and quiet. Reflections work best in the morning when the wind has not yet picked up. I have made both photographs and I am not sure which one I prefer. Push on to Island Lake if you have the legs. It is another four hundred feet up and most people do not bother, which is reason enough.

Gallery