Adventure Is Out There: Hiking Colorado: James Peak Lake and Echo Lake

It's no secret we like to hike away from the crowds and sometimes that means driving some rough 4WD roads to get to a trail and that is exactly how we came to the trail for James Peak Lake. But our 3 year old loves these bumpy roads and now every time we go hiking he thinks you must go on a bump road to find trail!

As we got closer to the trailhead the road looked a little rough so we decided to park about a mile away and walk to the trailhead. But as we began walking, it was one rough patch and the rest of the road was fine so if you can make it up in your car, you'd be able to make it to the trailhead just fine.

Now the one bad thing about this trail is the first .5 miles are straight downhill. It's never fun to have to end your hike going uphill, and especially a steep grade. After the initial decent down the trail you reach a trail junction; straight to James Peak Lake or right to Echo Lake. We started out straight and came up to James Peak Lake. Nothing surprising to the trail and it was pretty straight forward to the lake.

After reaching James Peak Lake we thought surely there was a trail that connected over to Echo Lake without walking back to the trail junction at the beginning, but there is not. So we wandered around making our way over to Echo Lake eventually. Not ideal with kids in packs, lol.

Echo Lake was beautiful but we "adventure hiked" again to find the trail that led to the junction as it was not clearly visible from where we came up to Echo Lake. But we eventually found it and headed back to the car and out on the bumpy road where we then headed up to Estes to visit family at their cabin. If you was solidarity an have a car that can handle a rough 4WD road, James Peak Lake trail was beautiful and I recommend it!