The Colorado River Headwaters: Part 3

Grand Lake to Long Draw Road and the Trek to the Headwaters

The initial drive past Shadow Mountain Lake and Lake Granby was, to put it mildly, pretty dismal. The overcast skies pressed down on the landscape like a heavy wool blanket, muting everything to shades of steel gray and pewter. The lakes, usually so vibrant and inviting, looked cold and uninviting. For someone who's spent decades photographing and filming the American Southwest, I know the difference good light makes, and this wasn't it.

But then, about halfway to Walden, something magical happened—the kind of transformation that reminds you why you keep coming back to these mountains. The clouds began to break apart like ice floes in spring runoff, and suddenly golden autumn light came flooding through in spectacular shafts. The fall colors along the roadway—aspens in brilliant yellow, willows in bronze and crimson, scrub oak in deep burgundy—lit up like Christmas lights strung across the high country. And there, in the distance, the mountain ranges revealed themselves, their peaks freshly dusted with snow, standing proud against a clearing sky.

My fingers, which had been crossed figuratively, tightened on the steering wheel with renewed optimism. Maybe, just maybe, the snow conditions on Long Draw Road would be manageable.

We rolled into the LaPoudre Pass Trailhead near noon, right on schedule. The parking area was empty except for one other vehicle, and the silence of the high country was almost overwhelming—the kind of quiet that seems to press against your ears after the steady hum of highway driving.

After lunch, we shouldered our day packs and started down the trail. The path followed LaPoudre Creek—also known as Cache la Poudre River—downstream for about a mile to where a bridge should cross, leading to the trail toward the Colorado River headwaters. The Cache la Poudre is itself a significant Colorado waterway, flowing east from these mountains through Fort Collins and eventually joining the South Platte River. The name, which translates to "cache of powder" in French, comes from French fur trappers who reportedly buried gunpowder along its banks during a snowstorm.

Then we found it—or at least we thought we did. A small stream, barely a foot wide, bubbling down through the meadow. According to my GPS, this was the Colorado River. Not the mile-wide torrent that carves through the Grand Canyon. Not even the substantial river we'd been following through Rocky Mountain National Park. This was the Colorado River at its absolute beginning—a modest trickle you could step across without getting your boots wet.

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