To-Hike List: The Strawberry Lakes and Big Pine Lake Expedition

Few things pique my interest like discovering discrepencies in information relayed by sources I consider to be equally reputable. In the route planning world that is backpacking, there is no primary source leaned upon more than a map, second only to ‘your own legs’ on the list of things that can get you to your destination and back home again.

I’m old enough to admit that I grew up reading through Rand McNally road atlases when I was younger. Not the online versions, the paper book version – the hard copy that you could hold in your own hands. Perhaps that’s why I’m still a sucker for a hard copy map, one that I’ll do my legwork on ahead of time while planning and that will also ride along with me for reference on the trek.

I lean hard into National Geographic’s Trails Illustrated maps, and can honestly say I’ve never been let down by them. Their consistency and attention to detail make their format easily compatible to canyon trips and alpine trips alike, their topographical precision as admirable as their map construction is durable. They don’t get wet, they don’t really tear or crease, and they almost always tell you every single thing they can about a place.

I say almost always because of a discrepancy I found between their map of Colorado’s Holy Cross Wilderness (#149) and the information relayed online by both Gaia GPS and CalTopo, the two digital sources I use as cross references to my hard copy maps when planning routes.

Located just south of Vail, the Holy Cross Wilderness contains nearly 123,000 acres of protected lands surrounding Mount of the Holy Cross (14,011 feet) in the northern portion of the Sawatch Range. Though it boasts only one 14er, it is filled with jagged peaks routinely topping 13,000 feet in elevation, and has a maze of lakes and drainages that make it one of the premier areas for alpine and subalpine backpacking trips around.

If you didn’t pick up on ‘located just south of Vail’ and ‘one of the premier areas,’ I’ll spell it out a little bit more clearly: the Holy Cross Wilderness can get crowded.

There are some 164 miles of trails within the area, but its beauty is matched only by its accessibility. You can get to most every significant trailhead from the heart of Denver in 2 to 3 hours if I-70 hasn’t snarled itself to a halt, and its relative lack of size means there are few places you cannot get to on a day hike. Therefore, even if you try to pull off a four or five day trip, you’re going to encounter day hikers wherever you are as you piecemeal your way around the area.

Even if you try the roughly 34 mile Holy Cross Loop, you’ll have day hikers on the Cross Creek Trail section, plenty of day hikers on the Missouri Lakes section, and perhaps even more on the east side of Mount of the Holy Cross as you enounter peakbaggers (and peak viewers) alike.

The crowds are the knock, but it remains one of my absolute favorite places to be on this planet. My long-standing goal, though, has been to try to find a way to build a four or five night trip in an area that few, if any other folks would be, and that’s where this discrepancy that’s now burning a hole in my pocket arose.

In the far southwest corner of the Holy Cross Wilderness sits the Eagle Lake Trailhead, the Eagle Lake Trail lighting out of it for 2.4 miles eastbound past Woods Lake towards – you guessed it – Eagle Lake. It’s an incredibly straightforward walk up Lime Creek, the drainage on the south side of both Fools Peak and Eagle Peak.

While I have a good bit of experience hiking off-trail, the reality is that I don’t get to spend nearly enough time on-trail these days to really think about building trips that aren’t readily accessible. Still, the desire to see more of Holy Cross while also getting away from crowds drew my eyes to this area given that a) the East Brush Creek drainage to its north is one of the most beautiful locations I’ve ever spent time in and b) while off-trail, this route seemed very straightforward up a single drainage with multiple named lakes as landmarks off which to routefind.

The trail to Eagle Lake might get crowded, sure, but what if I pushed on up to Halfmoon Lake? To Fairview Lake? Or all the way up to Strawberry Lakes? Surely folks make it up there often enough for there to be information out there, even if it’s a route that isn’t on my map. Folks out here really do like hiking up to mountain lakes, after all.

Before I even bothered to cross reference with Gaia GPS and CalTopo, I went looking for route descriptions of this particular attempt. The results of my search were far from straightforward – there’s certainly no AllTrails page for the route – and ended up creating a monster in the process.

• This post from climb13ers.com details a climbing trip to summit both UN13,100 and Ribbed Peak, all beginning from the drainage I was eyeing. In it, they mention “Beyond Eagle Lake, we don’t think the trail receives maintenance anyhow,” though apparently a trail picks up again once you reach Halfmoon Lake and continues in pieces towards Fairview Lake (where there’s a campsite mentioned). There’s no mention of anything extending all the way to Strawberry Lakes, however.
• Courtesy of Tim Drescher at BackpackingLight, this 2013 trip report details hiking the drainage all the way to Strawberry Lakes and that “past Eagle Lake the Forest Service no longer maintains trail.” Undeterred, they made it all the way to Strawberry Lakes on their trek despite encountering marsh, deadfall, and pseudo-trails…and that was a dozen years ago.
• This 2011 trip report from poster ‘Chicago Transplant’ in the 14ers.com forums details a route up the Lime Creek drainage as a means to access some of the 12ers in the Sawatch Range as they attempted to summit all the peaks within the Holy Cross Wilderness and Eagle County itself. The lede: This was to be a journey into the unknown. They leave trail on the south side of the creek – what’s left of the trail is on the north – but their viewpoint while summiting Avalanche Peak (12,803 feet) and the peaks further up drainage provides interesting information, including a visual of Strawberry Lakes themselves (and the shape that gives the upper lake its name). Most importantly, though, was this quote after their descent down to Strawberry Lakes to set up their return to the Eagle Lake Trailhead:

It was still a long way out though, and I didn’t think there was going to be a trail seeing as the maps show it ending at Eagle Lake several miles below me. To my surprise, however, there was a workable trail most of the way, sure it was overgrown in every meadow I crossed, but I was able to string it together and avoid any nasty bushwhacks on the way out.

Despite the version of my map neither listing a trail at all up to Strawberry Lakes nor even an unmaintained version of one, there clearly used to be one – and there was evidence that, if you look hard enough, there still was in places. Sure enough, both CalTopo and Gaia GPS each showed an existing trail all the way up the Lime Creek drainage to upper Strawberry Lake:

Strawberry Lakes and the upper Lime Creek drainage, while still very likely to be devoid of any other humans more often than not, looked to be accessible. The thing is, since almost every trip report I came across while researching involved summiting the various 12ers and 13ers on both sides of Lime Creek, the concept of finding a route up and out of the upper drainage now seemed more feasible than I ever imagined.

And if I could get out of the Lime Creek drainage on the north side, that meant I could access the upper end of several other drainages that have been on my to-hike list for years. Suddenly, that four or five night trek that I’d been trying to piece together in the Holy Cross Wilderness for over a decade now seemed like it might have a light at the end of the tunnel.

Enter Big Pine Lake, and yet another interesting map discrepancy that had previously piqued my interest.

The East Lake Creek Trail stars out just west of Beaver Creek Resort in Avon, heading first southeast from the East Lake Trailhead before turning due south. As it climbs up to the eventual headwaters at Upper Camp Lake on the northwest side of Ribbed Peak, it passes each of Rainbow Lake, Lake Thomas, Big Pine Lake, Gold Dust Lakes, Big Lake, Horseshoe Lake, Big Spruce Lake, and several unnamed lakes.

It travels 9.6 miles until it becomes unmaintained, according to Trails Illustrated #149, with an additional ~3 miles of unmaintained trail marked on it as the route from the Big Spruce Lake drainage up to Upper Camp Lake. The funny thing is, though, that neither CalTopo nor Gaia GPS seem to be in full agreement with the paper map.

CalTopo shows only a 1.3 mile section of the East Lake Trail extending past the Dead Dog Trail junction, with none of the upper 8ish miles of the drainage showing even an unmaintained trail. Gaia GPS, however, shows the entire route up to Upper Camp Lake as being a maintained trail.

As if the discrepancy between sources wasn’t enough to prompt me to want to check out that section, this 2013 trip report from the 14ers.com forums about a peakbagging trip up New York Mountain (12,550 feet), Finnegan Peak (13,346 feet), and Gold Dust Peak (13,380 feet) on the western side of the East Lake Creek drainage highlighted how “the area around Big Pine Lakes is perhaps one of the most astonishing areas in Colorado,” with author ‘Furthermore’ noting how they’d welcome the opportunity to return on a backpacking trip and spend more time in the area.

Two drainages of the southwest corner of the Holy Cross Wildernesses, both of which – depending upon the source – are some combination of trailed, unmaintained, or not-trailed at all. A trio of 13ers in Ribbed Peak, Finnegan Peak, and Pika Peak standing between them in various fashions, all previously unnamed before peakbaggers began to climb them and establish routes. Pair that with the known routes up and over Gold Dust Peak and Eagle Peak, and there may well be more ways to traverse this region that I previously imagined.

Might it be possible to connect the two using the climbing routes of the peaks between them? Could it even be possible to use the bulk of the summit routes as ascent guides, and instead of pursuing them all the way to the top find weak points and ‘passes’ in the 12,200 to 12,500 foot range?

That will be the goal of this summer’s expedition. Ideally, it will feature a pair of cars, one dropped either at the north end at East Lake Creek Trailhead, or perhaps further west at the Fulford Cave Campground at the end of the Lake Charles Trail – the latter could well be an option as an exit route over Gold Dust Peak from Big Pine Lake to Lake Charles itself.

Perhaps it’s possible to make it an entire loop, a pathway existing that’s just tough enough to keep the masses away while being navigable enough to do with a backpack large enough to sustain a four or five day trip. That’s what I’ll be searching for, though a rock solid consolation prize would be merely settling for a way to hike up Lime Creek, over to East Lake Creek, and experience two of the hidden gems in an otherwise known area of the Colorado high country.