Diamond Lake - Part 1

The boys are often looking to find new hikes to do in the area on hot days.  As we continue to find a lot of trails, it becomes more and more challenging to find ones that meet all there criteria: water, rivers, lake.  After some searching we found this trail to Diamond Lake.  It starts about five miles west of the small town of Eldora up a somewhat rough dirt road.  We were thankful to be there on a week day so the traffic and parking situation wasn't bad.  Here we are pre-hike and ready to hit the trails!

The hike itself starts out at almost 10,000 ft, just a bit under treeline and was supposed to wind its way about 2.5 to 3.0 miles up to Diamond Lake.  This is a look across the canyon to a nice small river that flows down with little waterfalls.  The pine tree smell when you get back in the forest is so refreshing!

After about a mile in, we started to find these little streams coming down the hillside and making waterfalls almost every quarter to half mile.  Of course we had to stop at each one and build some rock dams and cool off along the way.

Here is a picture of the three of us at one of the bigger streams we found early on in the hike.  I have to imagine this could be a pretty crazy trail earlier in the season when there is still a lot more snow melt and water coming down.  In any case, we decided to keep pushing on in search of other new things to find.

One of the funny things we stumbled across was this tree that had a crazy bend to it.  They each took some turns trying to do some pull-ups off of the trunk.