More of God's Wonders at Cottonwood Lake

We're way behind in getting travel posts published because we were having way too much fun traveling! So we won't be confused about when each "wandering" happened, we'll start each blog with its actual date.

July 31, 2023

Just a few miles west of Buena Vista, along a gravel road that leads deeper into the mountains, is one of the best mountain lakes to kayak in this area. We headed to Cottonwood Lake early in the morning, knowing that in the afternoon winds and lightning storms could interrupt this tranquility.

We only saw three other kayaks and SUPs this early. The water looked like glass, reflecting the mountains around it.

It's hard to show in a photo how big the mountains that surrounded us were. You can't even see the cars parked on the edge of the lake because they were so tiny in comparison to Sheep Mountain.

The water was perfectly clear, and we could see the fish swimming beside us.

While it was nice to row all around the edge of Cottonwood Lake, we had to say that our favorite area was where the river grass starts infringing on the west edge of the lake.

The grass formed mazes that we followed to see how far they would lead us deeper into the mountains. Sometimes we were led by a duck who was quite surprised to see a boat in this section.

The ducks seemed quite calm when we approached their secret passage very slowly.

We were going very slowly because the water was quite shallow and we didn't want to hit the bottom. It was surrounded by grass and willows, and we had a fellow kayaker warn us of the moose. Sitting low in a kayak and surrounded by tall shrubbery, it is impossible to see a moose eating willows just a few feet away. The kayaker was surprised last year when he startled a moose, who charged towards him and his kayak.

So Mark decided to look over the tops of the greenery around us, hoping to spot a moose. Our kayak is stable enough to stand up, but we rarely do. That's because the movement of the back passenger standing up will sway the front passenger side to side in such a way that it surely feels like she would be dumped overboard. In other words, it makes Denisa scream. That would scare the moose away. The truth is that even if we did capsize, we were in less than 6 inches of water.

In these shallow inlets, we got a close-up view of the Colorado lake fish swimming right below us.

Most of the inlets end in a beaver dam, and we're always amazed at their engineering ability.

Back on the big lake, we took another opportunity to row all the way around Cottonwood Lake because it was such a beautiful day. We have wandered into another of God's wonders! We did notice that clouds were starting to build in the blue skies, so it was time to get the boat off the water.

More boats were arriving, and the water was getting more choppy as we dried off the kayak and bid farewell to Cottonwood Lake.

We still had plenty of daylight, and we were getting used to the idea of being in one place for an entire month so we could explore it more thoroughly. So we decided to drive further down the gravel road that led us to the lake. We found lots of disbursed camping sites in the national forest, and a no-hook-up campground that looked very nice. We also saw a sign that indicated we were in a wildlife viewing area. We were right below Sheep Mountain, and the sign said we were supposed to see mountain sheep here. We decided to just hike a little ways to look for wildlife, so we didn't take any water with us. We also didn't have a trail, so we headed straight up that mountain in a heart-pounding elevation gain. But that quickly gave us more views of Cottonwood Lake from above.

While we found plenty of sheep poop, we never saw any mountain sheep on Sheep Mountain. We were trying to find an alternative way down to avoid that steep incline, when we found a gravel trail. We followed it, even though we didn't know where it was leading. We only knew that it appeared to be going down in elevation, and that's the direction we needed to get back to the pickup.

We hiked through a canopy of aspens as the storm hit. We had seen the clouds building earlier, and they delivered some lightning and sleet on this last day of July. We were glad to be a little lower in elevation with some tree cover during the storm.

Our gravel trail took us a couple miles out of the way, but we eventually made it back to where we left the pickup parked. We were wishing for some water on this longer-than-planned hike. Note to self: NEVER leave on a hike with Mark without water because it will always turns out longer than you think. We somehow managed to find more of God's wonders than we planned at Cottonwood Lake!