Chasm Lake or Sky Pond? I Hiked Both to Find Out
Last summer, I was camping in Rocky Mountain National Park when I overheard a group of college aged students at a nearby campsite debating an important question: Chasm Lake or Sky Pond?
They went back and forth for what seemed like hours, trying to decide which hike they should do the next morning. Eventually, one of them wandered over and asked my friend and me if we’d hiked either trail and which one we’d recommend. I had to admit that I’d hiked neither, so I was absolutely no help. They kept debating until dark, and sometime around four in the morning, I heard them getting up and heading out. I never found out which trail they chose.
For some reason, that tiny interaction stuck with me. I wanted to know the answer. Not because there necessarily had to be a winner, but because I wanted to earn an opinion. I wanted to hike both trails, stand beside both lakes, scramble over the rocks myself, and finally be able to say, okay, now I know. So that’s exactly what I did.
Last year I hiked Chasm Lake, and this summer I finally made it to Sky Pond.
The hikes are surprisingly similar in distance, but not quite as similar in difficulty. Sky Pond is about 9.8 miles round trip with roughly 1,710 feet of elevation gain, while Chasm Lake is around 8.5 miles round trip with close to 2,400 feet of gain. Chasm Lake also sits at about 11,760 feet, nearly 800 feet higher than Sky Pond at around 10,950 feet. So even though Chasm is technically a little shorter, it packs considerably more climbing into the trail, and you feel the altitude.
Sky Pond has its own kind of intensity, though. The route takes you past Alberta Falls, the Loch, and Lake of Glass before reaching the final basin beneath dramatic granite spires. The most memorable part is the scramble beside Timberline Falls. And when I say beside the waterfall, I mean practically through it. You climb steep, wet rock while water runs beside you, which adds a little adrenaline to an otherwise beautiful hike. Once you’re above the falls, everything opens up, and the landscape feels completely different.
Chasm Lake feels more rugged from the beginning. When we hiked it, the parking lot was already full with people heading up toward Longs Peak, so we had to park farther away and ended up hiking closer to nine miles. The higher we climbed, the thinner the air felt. By the time we reached the final scramble into the lake basin, the whole hike felt bigger, harder, and somehow more serious.
Then you crest the rocks and suddenly Chasm Lake is sitting beneath the massive east face of Longs Peak. It’s hard to compete with that.
So if those students wandered into my campsite again today and asked me the same question, I could finally give them an answer. I’d choose Chasm Lake.
Sky Pond is beautiful, and the scramble beside Timberline Falls makes it an adventure all its own, but Chasm Lake felt more epic to me. It’s steeper, it sits higher, and standing beneath Longs Peak gives it a sense of scale that’s difficult to describe until you’re actually there.
That said, I’m glad I didn’t know the answer when those students first asked me, because not knowing gave me a reason to go find out. There’s something satisfying about carrying a question around for a while and eventually answering it with your own experience. So much of life gives us answers instantly. We can search almost anything before we ever have to wonder about it for very long, but some questions are more fun when you have to walk several miles to answer them.
I still have no idea which trail those students chose that morning, but now, if somebody asks me the same question around a campfire someday, I finally know what I’ll say: do both, then decide for yourself.
