Echo Lake Park

Echo Lake Park is a park located along the Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway about west of Denver, Colorado. The park provides a stone shelter with picnic tables and barbecue grills on one end of the lake, and the 1926 Echo Lake Lodge and an Arapaho National Forest campground are found at the other. Access to backpacking trails, including the Chicago Lakes trail and Lincoln Lakes trail, can be found adjacent to the lake. The park is part of the Denver Mountain Parks system.

Historic designation

Echo Lake Park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. The listing included two contributing buildings, two contributing structures, and a contributing site on. It included the Echo Lake Lodge, built in 1926, which was designed by Denver architect Jacques Benedict, a two-story octagonal log building on a base of local granite that resembles a Native American earth lodge.
Echo Lake, along with Mount Blue Sky, was designated as a historic site by the American Physical Society in 2017, in honor of many cosmic-ray physics experiments conducted at the lake and on the mountain between 1935 and 1960. The historic plaque is outside the Echo Lake Lodge.

Echo Lake is a shallow, oligotrophic lake situated at above sea level near Mount Blue Sky in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. It formed during the latest period of glaciation roughly 10,000 years ago. As glaciers retreated in the Chicago Creek valley, lateral moraines formed a natural dam to drainage, forming the lake. The ecosystem around the lake is dominated by Engelmann Spruce and Subalpine Fir, with some Limber Pine on exposed sites.