In the spring of 2023, Emily Kasyon hiked the Hanging Lake Trail in the White River National Forest for the first time. The water was so high she waded through it the entire way up.

“My very first site visit out to this site was during high runoff,” said Kasyon, project lead with the National Forest Foundation. “The very first time I ever hiked this trail, it was completely flooding. I was hiking in ankle-deep water the whole way up.”

That hike told her everything she needed to know about the job ahead.

Rising 1.2 miles through steep terrain in Glenwood Canyon, the Hanging Lake trail offers a rare combination of natural beauty and accessibility, making it both a treasured destination and a place that required thoughtful care and the partnerships to restore access to this cherished location.

The trail is one of Colorado’s most beloved hikes, drawing visitors from around the world to experience its turquoise waters, dramatic canyon walls and cascading waterfalls.

Before the fires and flooding, Hanging Lake drew tens of thousands of visitors a year and generated millions of dollars in economic activity for Glenwood Springs and surrounding communities. Losing the trail impacted the town directly, said Glenwood Springs Mayor Marco Dehm.

“The trail itself being closed was devastating," Dehm said. "We felt the impacts of people not coming because of Hanging Lake, and that was felt throughout the community.”

Kasyon knew the economic and the personal impact Hanging Lake had to the community, and that it had to be repaired.

“Knowing how many people care about this trail, I knew that given the level of work that was needed, it was going to take a lot of people to make it happen,” she said.

Three years later, in June, the trail reopened.

A canyon on fire, then underwater

It all started with the Grizzly Creek Fire in 2020, which burned more than 30,000 acres throughout Glenwood Canyon and lasted four months, and left the steep slopes above Hanging Lake bare. The trail leading to the lake did not survive the fire.

“After the fire, we had record rainfall, which led to massive mudslides and debris flows,” said Leanne Veldhuis, district ranger with Eagle-Holy Cross Ranger District in the White River National Forest. “That is what wiped out much of the trail. Several of the trail bridges were knocked off their foundations and pushed downstream.”

Veldhuis explained that Hanging Lake was too important of a recreation destination to leave in disrepair.  The visitor draw adds to the local economy in Glenwood Springs.

The Forest Service along with the National Forest Foundation, Colorado Lottery, Get Outdoors Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, city of Glenwood Springs and other local contributors spent the next several years rebuilding the trail. Step by step and bridge by bridge, it was built into something durable to hold up against whatever mother nature may bring for the next 100 years.

Building a coalition before building a trail

Long before crews broke ground, the project's leaders had to answer the tough questions: how were they going to fund the project, and who was going to help build.

“The notion of partnerships is embedded in our DNA,” said Dieter Fenkart-Froeschl, president and chief executive officer with the National Forest Foundation. “We understand the collaboration and the collective ultimately get us to a better place when we do it together.”

The project was jumpstarted by American Relief Act funding awarded to the National Forest Foundation but required additional funding to complete the work—that meant going well beyond federal disaster recovery dollars. GOCO, which invests a portion of Colorado Lottery proceeds to preserve and enhance trails within the state, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife each provided grant funding for the project. 

Created by Colorado voters in 1992 through a constitutional amendment, GOCO has since invested $1.7 billion in more than 5,900 projects across all 64 counties across Colorado.

“The people of Colorado back in the early ‘90s knew that if we were going to preserve the outdoor heritage that so many of us have come to love about Colorado, and it's part of our state identity, that we needed to have the resources in place to help fund the places and the projects that make Colorado so great,” said Jackie Miller, executive director of GOCO.

For Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the project lined up with its own mission of protecting resources and encouraging people to become stewards of them.

“Hanging Lake is such a unique resource,” said Fletcher Jacobs, assistant director for recreation and lands with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “Once you get up there, you just kind of have that sense of awe.”

Hanging Lake, he said, is the type of place that just makes that case for itself.
The city of Glenwood Springs, private donors and volunteer groups rounded out the partnership, alongside the Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation, which managed the overall budget and construction contracts.

Rebuilding a trail that floods every year

Sam Massman, the Forest Service recreation program manager for the project, said the central design challenge never really went away. His concern was building a sustainable trail that sits next to a creek.

“Trying to find the balance between giving people access to water, but having a sustainable trail was the hardest part of the job,” Massman said. “Moving the trail up the hillside, away from the water, was on the table early on. It didn't survive contact with what people actually love about the hike.”

Construction became a back-and-forth with the landscape itself.

“We had a flood after our preliminary designs,” he said. “We looked at the bridges while the creek was flooding and adjusted designs accordingly.”

Not every problem showed up in Grizzly Creek. Massman said the trailhead, the very first thing visitors see, was what kept him up at night, given how much bigger a footprint it needed and how difficult the terrain around it was to build on.

For Kasyon, the moment the project turned a corner came about halfway through the first year of construction.

“There was just one site visit where we came out and the crews had really gotten rolling,” she said. “It had taken them a week, and they'd just built such a long section of trail that was all stairs, and it just looked beautiful.”

(left) Trail crews install hand-built stone steps during reconstruction of the Hanging Lake Trail in White River National Forest near Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The project included more than 1,000 stone steps designed to improve durability while preserving the trail's character. (right) A helicopter transports bridge components into Glenwood Canyon during reconstruction of the Hanging Lake Trail in White River National Forest. The canyon's steep terrain required crews to fly materials into areas inaccessible to heavy equipment. (Forest Service photos)

By the time the 1.2-mile trail was finished, the work included seven new bridges, more than 1,000 hand-built stone steps, an expanded trailhead and a new boardwalk near the lake. What made this project especially unique was that the bridges needed to be flown in by helicopter due to the canyon being too narrow and steep for traditional machinery to be used.

Massman said he's most proud of Spouting Rock, a side feature along the trail that had become an undeveloped trail before the rebuild.

What it means to get it back

On the morning of the reopening event, Jacobs got up early and hiked the trail before anyone else arrived.

“I was up there by myself,” he said. “Just being out there, like you feel that connection and seeing those resources, just yeah, you kind of have that sense of nature, that sense of place that is so special.”

Veldhuis said the goal now is for the rebuilt trail to hold up for a century.

“What we've built here today is our goal for the next 100 years, to have the trail be in place to this iconic destination,” she said.

(left) Two hikers make their way up the Hanging Lake Trail in White River National Forest near Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The trail reconstruction finished June 2026 after a multi-year effort led by the Forest Service and its partners following damage caused by the 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire and subsequent flooding. (right) Visitors hike the revitalized Hanging Lake Trail in White River National Forest near Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The trail's reconstruction improved access to one of Colorado's most popular recreation destinations following years of repairs. (Forest Service photos by Travis Weger)

Dehm explains that Hanging Lake is part of Glenwood Springs’ past, present and future and the community will get to be part of it for the next hundred years.

For Kasyon, who has spent three years hiking to the lake almost every week, the reopening is bittersweet.

“One of the greatest things about this project is seeing people hike it and overhearing their conversations and seeing the look in their eyes when they see the lake for the first time," she said. "That makes all of this worth it.”