The Highest Yacht Club on Earth

You might not expect to find sailboats at more than eight thousand feet above sea level, but the low building on the shore here belongs to the Grand Lake Yacht Club, which sits at roughly eight thousand three hundred feet and holds official recognition as the highest registered yacht club in the world. The club was incorporated in the spring of nineteen oh two with a membership of just four people. What put it on the map was a dinner in Denver in nineteen twelve, when club members hosted the British tea magnate and famous yachtsman Sir Thomas Lipton.

After an evening of sailing stories and good company, Lipton announced that he would sponsor a trophy for an annual race on Grand Lake, and the next summer he shipped an ornate sterling silver cup out to Colorado. The Lipton Cup has been raced here every year since nineteen thirteen, which makes it the oldest continuously contested Lipton trophy anywhere in the world. To this day, on regatta weekends, sailors tack back and forth across this alpine lake chasing a piece of silverware sent by a tea baron more than a century ago, on water so high and so cold that most people would never think to put a boat on it at all.