Refrigerated in the Lost Creek Wilderness, a hidden gem tucked in Colorado's Front Range

So often your assumptions about the familiar turn out to be wildly off-base. I said your. I mean mine here, of course.

Places or products you observe in passing enough to make them feel as if they’re known quantities, like the burger joint you pass every time on your route to the gym that you keep telling yourself you’ll try, but haven’t. It can’t be too different than any other burger joint, after all, and you’ve now created in your own mind how it must be to help tie your route together, your plan together, your existence together.

Anyone who has ever sought refuge in the Front Range and beyond and set out from Denver to pursue it knows there are two primary routes to deliver you there. There is one – I-70 – which is the bane of travel existence, a concrete purgatory that, like the Bermuda Triangle, messes with clocks and schedules while vaporizing vessels and setting would-be explorers adrift in the abyss. The other – US-285 – is more the salty fishing boat to I-70’s cruise ship, a windy and mostly two-lane route that sneaks you further south, the work-around route that more often than not serves as the dependable tortoise to 70’s hare.

Rest assured, 285 still remains quite busy. While it doesn’t give the direct service to hot-spots like Vail and Lake Dillon the way that 70 does, it still gets you access to those in its own way. Beyond that, it serves as the first leg of access to so much of the state beyond the Front Range, the 14ers and southern mountains, the Arkansas River headwaters, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Great Sand Dunes, and more. In the fall, it takes you right over Kenosha Pass and its gloriously yellow aspen grove, a haven for leaf-peepers at an intersection of the Colorado Trail that sees thousands of visitors before the leaves finally drop.

The section of 285 as you descend south over Kenosha Pass is one of the most beautiful sections of road in the state, if not [insert much larger geographical unit here]. The high plains emerge, 14ers flank your right, and if the air is clear and the sun just right you can see the backside of Pikes Peak well off to your left. I’d passed through there dozens of times in both directions with a goofy smile on my face each time, noticing but quickly moving on from the left turn just below the pass down Lost Park Road.

Right from there, as the crow flies, is The Decalibron – 14ers Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, and Bross, which I’d heaved and wheezed up around and down two summers before. How different could what lay down Lost Park Road really be? Just how much could the Lost Creek Wilderness throw my way, with Bison Peak – the area’s tallest – topping out at just over 12,400 feet?

We were finally there to find out, and not to merely cruise by and assume. Thanks to an odd weather pattern, we’d get to trek through it at a time of year when very few folks venture into its depths, after the aspens have shed their coat and when the first snows had already begun to blanket parts of the region. Lucky for us, though, the snows had held off just long enough there to open one final window to explore it while dry.

We knew the snows were coming, as the forecast for just after our trip had it on the docket. We knew there’d be frigid air rolling over us ahead of it, too, though I’ll admit I underestimated just how much rolling it would do. We had 37 miles to soak in the Lost Creek Wilderness down Wigwam Creek, through the depths of Refrigerator Gulch, under the watchful crag that is McCurdy Park Tower, and eventually up over Bison Pass.

Over three days, it was about to go from afterthought to one of my favorite places in the entire state, doing so with terrain I never expected. It would slap us with near-zero temperatures, a scarcity of water, a shredded shoe, a trail along the creek that laid bare why it was called ‘lost’ in the first place, a few thousand feet of grind, and constantly remind us that even the overlooked realms in the shadows of the west’s more distinct wonders can swing haymakers drunk with rawness and beauty.

On a sunny Thursday in late October, we turned left off 285 and onto a 19 mile gravel path to Lost Park, a washboard strip that rattled both bones and suspensions that would take us to our first path down the Wigwam Trail.

You can read more about the trip into Colorado’s Lost Creek Wilderness here, in the next installment of the trip recap.