San Miguel Area Details
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Description: The San Miguel range consists of craggy and difficult summits between Molas and Lizard Head Passes. A dozen summits top out above 13,000 feet in elevation, the highest of which is 13,984-foot Grizzly Peak, and many are banded by impenetrable cliffs that make route-finding a challenge. These impressive peaks tower over several alpine cirques graced by indescribably delightful lakes, creating some of
Colorado's most breath-taking mountain scenery, including the extraordinary Ice Lake Basin. A generous network of trails laces the area, including a 20-mile segment of the Colorado Trail, offering hikers abundant opportunities for exploration. Popular trails to Engineer Mountain and Ice Lake provide additional recreational highlights within the area. The combination of alpine lakes, difficult peaks, and abundant trails create outstanding opportunities for recreation and for solitude.
While aspen forests grace the area's lower slopes around Cascade Creek and elsewhere, and thick forests of spruce and fir blanket the western fringes around Sheep Mountain and Lizard Head Pass, most of San Miguel Peak roadless area lies above treeline. An extensive forest fire in 1879 denuded the slopes west of Molas Pass, leaving stumps and skeletal trees. In July and August, these alpine fields explode in a profusion of red, blue, yellow, and white blossoms of wildflowers such as columbines, paintbrush, buttercups, and lupine. The area's mountains consist largely of marine sediments eroded from the Ancestral Rockies more than 200 million years ago and now comprise the limestones and red sandstones and shales which dominate these high peaks. An immense icecap in the last few million years smoothed the terrain surrounding the jagged peaks into the modern landscape's rolling slopes and deep u-shaped valleys.
The area’s ecological pristineness is attested by the proposed Grizzly Peak Research Natural Area (RNA). This RNA encompasses the alpine slopes and subalpine forests surrounding Grizzly Peak in the roadless area’s northwest quadrant. The RNA is proposed for protection because of its high quality tufted hairgrass, its wet spruce-fir forest on moderate slopes, and alpine vegetation on large areas of shale geology.
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