Crater Lakes Trail, James Peak Wilderness, Colorado

When to Go

As you can tell from the photos, you can do this trip year-round. In the summer and fall, it’s a super-easy beginner trip that’s pretty enough to inspire more backpacking trips. In winter and early spring, it makes for a good entrance into the world of winter backpacking. In late spring, it’s probably a muddy mess and best avoided.

The only drawback in the summer is that the camping spots are not too far from the trailhead, so you may have trouble finding a campsite with privacy from day hikers. The best move to get a secluded campsite would be to camp on the lake bank opposite the trail or to hike the extra 0.4 miles up to Upper Crater Lake. Surprisingly, even in the winter, we were seeing more visitors than we normally expect around our campsite.

Our cozy tent through the trees.

The southern-most Crater Lake.

Before You Go

There’s nothing to do before you go — no permit, no reservations, you don’t even really need to worry about parking because the parking lot is quite large. If you want to do some research about the area or its wildlife, you can check out the National Forest website.

Getting There

The trail begins at the end of an 8-mile dirt road that has at least different three names: East Portal Road, Rollins Pass Road and forest road 16. If you type “Moffat Tunnel East Portal TH Parking Lot” into your map app of choice, you should be fine.

Depending on which direction you’re coming from, you’ll have two different options for picking up last minute supplies. Rollinsville is the closest town to the trailhead, but there’s nowhere to pick up food or supplies in town. If you’re coming from the north along highway 119, the closest grocery store is in Nederland. If you’re coming from the south, your best option is a convenience store called Taggert’s, which is around a 12 minute drive from Rollinsville.

The trailhead is so close to home for us, that we didn’t end up stopping anywhere. Ultimately, I think the best option would probably be to stock up in Denver or Boulder.

I snapped a quick ~night~ photo from the inside of our tent.

Ask me how many times we slid across the frozen lake.

On the Trail

The trail starts out at the Heart Lake Trailhead and heads right into the forest. The first 1.5 miles of the hike are on the South Boulder Creek Trail, which makes its way all the way across the James Peak Wilderness. Early on, you’ll see the Moffat Tunnel and an abandoned-looking house. In this first 1.5 miles until the junction with the Crater Lakes Trail, the trail is slightly uphill, but it’s nothing too steep.

At the junction with the Crater Lakes Trail, turn right. We noticed that even with some snow on the ground, the sign was easy to spot; however, you’d have a hard time finding it with more than 3 feet of snow. After turning onto the Crater Lakes Trail, you’ll hike another 1.0 mile to the first lake. The actual trail straddles the hill between the two first lakes, but in the winter, previous hikers had veered the trail south onto the frozen lake. Luckily, the trail didn’t cross the lake, it just skirted the north bank — but we were definitely walking on frozen water. We could have still followed the original trail, but we would have had to break the trail ourselves by post-holing.

During our hike, we did a little extra back-tracking, because we followed the tracks of other hikers onto the frozen lake, but then second-guessed ourselves after checking the GPS. We walked back to the spot where the actual trail veers onto the hill, but never found a good way to pass through without post-holing. We ended up going right back to the frozen lake, making our way across, and then heading north to the south-western bank of the northern lake.

By the time we got to the lakes, it was cold and windy, so we didn’t attempt the steep hike up to Upper Crater Lake. We ended up finding a cozy grove of trees right next to the northern lake where we could get some cover from the wind and some nice views. The lake was so frozen that we were almost able to walk all the way to the center of the lake.

After a frosty, sub-zero night, we crammed our feet into frozen boots and hiked out the same way we hiked in.

After the Hike

This trailhead is so close to home for us that we drove straight home after the trip and ate lunch there. If you’re curious about the food scene around Nederland and Eldora, most of the food is found in Nederland. In Nederland, you’ll find the usual fare like pizza, sandwiches, bakeries, a brewery and Indian, Thai, and Mexican food. The food looks surprisingly good and varied for a town of around 1,500 people.

Thinking about doing this trip? Have any questions? Comment down below!