Last Updated on January 8, 2014 by James Dziezynski
Jewell Lake Icefall is a beautiful wall of ice just southwest of Jewell Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s a fairly popular destination on weekends but most weekdays you’ll have the place to yourself. It’s a quick 3.2 mile hike from the Glacier Gorge trailhead off of Bear Lake Road (about 8.4 miles from the Beaver Meadows Entrance of RMNP) that passes by — or in this case, over — Mills Lake and Jewell Lake.
It was a fun little outing and I can’t wait to get back and do some more legit climbing on the ice. All told it’s about 6.2 miles round trip with a modest elevation gain of about 900 feet on the way up. Both Mills Lake and Jewell Lake were frozen hard, so I wouldn’t suggest following my GPS tracks in the summer 🙂