Head north 7.4 miles from the Grand Lake entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park and you come to a rather innocuous-looking parking lot and campground. In fact, you’ve discovered one of the park’s most fascinating locations—the Holzwarth Historic Site, or as it was more quaintly known in the 1920s, the Never Summer Dude Ranch—where for $2 a night (or $11 a week) you could stay in a rough-hewn log cabin beneath towering pines, enjoy home-cooked meals, sit around a campfire, horseback ride, and (according to the advertising of the day) fish for “all the trout you could catch.”
As you head out on the gentle gravel path that leads to the old ranch site, you cross a culvert built over a gently meandering creek, so small in summer you can almost jump across it. If it weren’t for the information sign by the side of the trail, you'd have no idea that you just crossed the upper reaches of the mighty Colorado River—or as it was originally known, the Grand River, carver of the Grand Canyon that bears its name.
