Lost Creek. If ever a patch of real estate was aptly named, then surely this is it. The creek itself becomes “lost” and completely disappears nearly a dozen times from its source in Lost Park to its confluence with Goose Creek. Over the years some hikers and fishermen have become so lost in Lost Creek that their bodies were never found. The Lost Creek Wilderness is located in the Rampart Range portion of the Colorado Front Range southwest of Denver and is home to myriad spires, towers, arches, hoodoos, domes, and other phantasmagorical shapes cast in granite. Lost Creek is to granite what southern Utah is to sandstone, an other-worldly landscape beautiful to behold but beholden to no one for their safety and well-being. Although many wonderful trails exist in the wilderness area, a trip down the mostly trailess Lost Creek itself is a physical journey to the edge of madness. Needless-to-say, Carlos and I had to go check it out.


My friend Carlos Schellhorn is not a climber, but is an incredibly strong outdoor athlete delightfully devoid of good sense. He and I had made winter backpacking trips between Crested Butte and Aspen when drought winters convinced us that we did not need skis or snowshoes, only to find ourselves post-holing through thigh-deep snow for miles. This was so obviously unappealing that we would reprise our post-holing adventures every few years on various 14’ers just to remind ourselves of how much fun we weren’t having. Naturally, Carlos was just the dude with which to venture into the tortured bowels of Lost Creek.

We planned for about a 4 day trip from the trailhead near Lost Park to the trailhead at Goose Creek, and travelled with fairly light packs (~25 lbs.) as we anticipated having to deal with “interesting” terrane in places where Lost Creek disappeared beneath ridges of boulders and other obstructions. After dropping a vehicle off at the Goose Creek trailhead, Carlos’ lovely bride Linda drove us around to our starting point. The journey started innocently enough around noon with a beautiful trail leading into the upper meadows of Lost Park – a more idyllic starting point would be hard to imagine.


After a few miles of gentle walking the trail leaves Lost Park and heads south through willows and past granite formations that look like melted ice cream. The trial gets more hobbit-like as it passes through deep mossy grottos and shady alcoves – and then it drops off the edge of the world. Here the trail gets very steep indeed, descending a grussy and bouldery slope that feels like going down a ski hill covered in marbles and bowling balls. Once we had safely descended this slope we had truly entered a different world. This was the first of many sub-valleys we would enter, and one of the few that had a trail in it. Up to now hiking had been easy cheesy, except for that gnarly descent down into the “lost world”, and this first magical valley would be our first night’s camp.


The following morning we followed our trail until it disappeared into a series of “paths” and “possible ways to go” towards the end of our little sub-valley. Here Lost Creek itself disappeared beneath a pile several hundred feet high composed of house-sized boulders. One “path” led straight up the south side of the valley, which was incredibly steep, while the north side went into and up a boulder field of ever larger boulders. Hopping boulders sounded like more fun, but this route eventually led us up to a chimney-like slot through a granite cliff. To get through this slot we had to pass our packs up from low person to high person as we scrambled/climbed through the notch. Once through it we hoped that would be the last of that kind of silliness. Not even close. However, this led us into another unimaginably magical kingdom as Lost Creek reappeared from beneath the bouldery ridge.


At the far end of this new sub-valley we encountered one of the gentler divides between valleys where Lost Creek disappears again. This one comprised a swell of cabin-sized boulders infilled with fallen trees and flood debris. Crossing this divide entailed more boulder hopping and log walking until the creek resurfaced in a series of beaver ponds and willow wetlands. This would be the easiest pass between the found sections of Lost Creek we would encounter in our 4 days of exploration. More typically we would either be following a series of anastomosing game trials up some ridiculously steep slope to get past a boulder obstruction, or climb up through the house-sized boulders themselves. We did this countless times over the next few days. Had one of us fallen and injured himself we would have been well and truly screwed, as we were days from any trailhead and in impossible terrane to retreat from short of a helicopter rescue. However, once past each bouldery obstruction we would encounter yet another small valley of surpassing beauty and magic.


On the third day we encountered a trail along Lost Creek where a north-south hiking trail crosses the east-west Lost Creek near its midpoint. Although short-lived (it’s only a couple of miles long), this fisherman’s access trail gave us a temporary reprieve from the miles of sketchy and difficult route finding and backpacking. It also led us into the very heart of the granite spired and domed landscape that is the very essence of Lost Creek. Once past this reprieve we were back into full-on exploration and thrash through the untracked wilderness mode.


On our fourth and last day of adventure we encountered the infamous Lost Creek dam project. In the early 1920’s the Denver Water Board tried to create a dam on Lost Creek for municipal water storage by pumping cement down through the boulders on one of the largest obstructions in the Lost Creek drainage. The boulder and gravel filled Lost Creek drainage is so porous that the project was an utter failure, which should have been obvious to the engineers before the project was ever started. However, once we had surmounted that last high divide where they tried to create their damn we were home free. Due to those construction efforts we had a great trail along the creek for the last 5 miles out to the trailhead. We loved that. The previous 3 days had been the hardest backpacking either of us had ever done, crossing the most difficult terrane we had ever encountered. At the time we were unsure of whether we would ever be motivated to come back, it had that difficult.


Postscript: Lost Creek so impressed me with its other-worldly beauty that over the years I would return again and again to take various friends, lovers, and my wife and stepson to this magical place, but always sticking to the well-established wilderness trail system. And then I would occasionally get bit by the stupid bug and give the Lost Creek drainage another go. Since Carlos and I made our first traverse of it, I have made about 3 solo traverses of all or significant parts of this drainage again. At this point I have probably attempted virtually every alternative route past each of the boulder passes – none of them are easy and some of them border on the suicidal. Some of my paths up and over were not reversible so I was irretrievably committed to them. Some of them were so gnarly that stoves and cameras buried deep inside my pack did not survive the passage. One such passage took me deep inside a pile of boulders and required pushing my pack ahead of me and squeezing through the narrowest of passages, only to chimney out through the top of the boulder pile at the only spot I could, pulling my pack behind me on a landyard. In some of these places my body simply would never have been found if I had not figured out a way out from those boulder mazes. Traversing Lost Creek itself remains stunningly beautiful and remarkably dangerous – truly a trip to the edge of madness.