The Never Summer Mountains
Near Grand Lake, Colorado
The jagged range rising to the west and northwest, forming the horizon above the Kawuneeche Valley, carries one of the most evocative names in all of Colorado. These are the Never Summer Mountains, and the name is not a romantic invention by settlers. It is a translation of an Arapaho name.
When tribal members who had spent their youth in this country were asked what they called this range, they gave a word rendered at the time as Never No Summer, which scholars today translate as it is never summer, or simply the never summer place. And it fits. These peaks catch storms and snow so persistently that summer barely seems to touch their high shoulders.
One of the range's most striking features sits at its northern end, a sawtooth wall of rock called the Nokhu Crags. That name is Arapaho too, from a word meaning eagles nest, describing the sheer spires where the wind howls and few things can live. The Never Summer range also forms a hydrologic knife edge.
Snowmelt off its western face becomes the Colorado River, while the Grand Ditch intercepts much of that western water and sends it over the divide to the plains. So this cold, storm wracked ridge line, named by the Arapaho, quietly decides where a great deal of the West's water is going to go.
