Spirit Lake: The Deepest Water in Colorado

The water in front of you is the largest natural lake in Colorado, and the deepest. Its surface covers roughly five hundred acres, and it plunges down about two hundred seventy feet in places, cold and dark all the way to the bottom. Geologists say the lake was scooped out and then dammed by a glacier during the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, when a river of ice ground its way down out of the Never Summer Mountains and left behind a ridge of rubble that trapped the meltwater.

But long before there was a map name, the Ute people who summered here had their own name for it. They called it Spirit Lake, and they gave the cold water a wide berth, because they believed it was the dwelling place of departed souls, and that mists rising off the surface at dawn were those spirits moving over the water. There is a darker story attached to that name, and it should be told carefully, because accounts of it vary and it may be as much legend as history.

As the tale is passed down, a band of Ute were camped on this shore when an Arapaho war party attacked. The men stayed to fight, and the women and children were put on a large raft and pushed out toward the middle of the lake, where they were thought to be safe. Then a violent gust of wind swept down off the peaks and capsized the raft.

The women and children were thrown into the choppy, freezing water, too far from any shore to swim back, and they drowned. After that, the Ute are said to have avoided the lake entirely, and the mists at dawn were remembered as the spirits of the lost. The mining prospectors who arrived in the eighteen seventies traded that name for a plainer one, Grand Lake, borrowed from the Grand River, which is what the upper Colorado River was called back then.

But the older name lingers in the mists, and on a still morning, when fog is sliding across the surface, it is not hard to understand why a people who watched this water for generations decided it was a place where the living should tread lightly.