Hike to Chihuahua Lake, Montezuma, Colorado

Sep 29

I have yet to do a hike in Montezuma that I didn’t like. I have gone up Peru Creek Road quite a few times, but had never checked out Chihuahua Gulch until I did this hike. I parked at the bottom of the Chihuahua Gulch Jeep Road. We started our hike by hiking up this Jeep road - a true 4x4 road in my opinion. We saw no cars on this road, only true OHV vehicles. We walked along the road for about 2.3 miles. At that point, the road turned into a single track trail and we left all motorized vehicles behind. The views really started opening up. We had two popular 14ers to our right, Gray’s Peak and Torrey’s Peak. To our left was Lenawee Mountain and directly in front of us was Grizzly Peak. The hike got the steepest in the last half mile before reaching the lake. As we reached the high point of our hike, we began to turn southwest and the views of the lake appeared. It’s a gorgeous, deep blue lake. It was also exceptionally windy on the day we were there, which made our snack break pretty short. After our snack, we headed back to the car the same way we came. A beautiful out and back.

Total stats: 7.6 miles, 1800 ft of elevation gain.