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I didn't expect to find a real glacier in Boulder County. With blue skies, bright sun, warm temperatures, green slopes with dazzling wildflowers, (and steady talk of global warming), I really didn't expect extensive snow, aqua-blue ice, and gaping crevasses — but there it was, tucked up high in a valley, around the corner and out of sight, forming the headwaters of the South St. Vrain Creek.
From the Long Lake trailhead, a very familiar trail carried me along the lake's northern shore. I walked within a cathedral of firs with their heavy holiday odor, and beside bright blue water. Across the water, stretched the open expanse of Niwot Ridge with just a few small patches of snow on the north-facing slopes. It was a Monday morning, but singles, couples, and groups were walking, fishing, photographing flowers, exercising dogs, and meditating, perched on rocks.
At the end of Long Lake, I continued west up the Lake Isabelle/Pawnee Pass Trail and passed a meadow with a pool. I thought … there should be a moose here with antlers dripping. There were elephants — Elephanthead flowers, that is. I have yet to become complacent in the face of those floppy ears, flat forehead, and long curling trunk. How could such whimsical blooms come to be? Pink elephants — well, if these are DT's, they are certainly happy and un-anxious ones.
I climbed to Lake Isabelle, where a bright sparkle danced on every breeze-blown wavelet, and the air was quiet but for a soft steady slapping at the shore's edge. A roar gradually arose at the west end of the lake, where the creek poured in. I climbed in steep switchbacks among tumbled boulders and snow banks almost magenta with algae. Now the waters only trickled and gurgled among the rocks at my feet.
There is no distant view of Isabelle Glacier, no warning or initial taste. I climbed up among rocks and boulders, over a ridge, and there it was — a bowl of snow and ice, lapping up the slopes of the Continental Divide between Apache and Shoshoni Peaks. At the bottom of this bowl lay a pool of slate-blue water rimmed with aqua-blue ice. A bit up the slope were two actual crevasses just a little like what you might find up in the Canadian Rockies. And above the glacier, towered a forbidding vertical back wall spiked with turrets and minarets. Some of my awe might have been fatigue, a climber's high, or endorphin rush, but this is a wondrous, take-your-breath place.
So often, thunderstorms building into the afternoon chase us out of these high places, but this time, I could linger a while and soak it in.
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Lake Isabelle
South St. Vrain Creek above Isabelle, Apache Peak on the skyline
Looking down on "Upper Isabelle" and the trail east
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