About Lakes of RMNP

An independent project cataloguing every named lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The Project

This started with a simple question: how many lakes are there in Rocky Mountain National Park, and can I hike to all of them? The answer turned out to be 150 named lakes, ponds, and reservoirs — and no single resource had them all in one place. So we built one.

150
Named lakes
415
Square miles of park
18
Park areas covered
12,000ft+
Highest terrain

Rocky Mountain National Park's lakes range from road-accessible ponds you can see from your car window to remote alpine tarns requiring an 8+ mile off-trail scramble above tree line. They sit in glacially-carved valleys, perched on exposed ridgelines, and tucked behind waterfalls. Each one is worth knowing about.

🗺️
Interactive map All 150 lakes plotted on a self-hosted vector map with 3D terrain, hillshade, and contour lines. Filter by difficulty, click for details.
🥾
Visit tracking Log hikes, leave notes, and earn badges as you work toward visiting every lake.
📋
Hike reports See recent visits from the community on every lake page — real conditions, real dates.
🏔️
Park Access guide Timed entry permits, shuttle routes, backcountry camping rules, and entrance fees in one place.
On the horizon
📸 Community photo uploads 📝 Improved lake & hike descriptions 📈 Elevation profiles per lake 🗺️ GPX route overlays on maps 🥾 More actually getting out there and hiking the park!

Data Sources

Our lake research combines official name records, mapped water geometry, park information, and careful manual review. We compare GNIS names with NHD waterbody identifiers and OpenStreetMap features, retain the source evidence for each match, and leave uncertain records unresolved rather than guessing.

Browse the research ledger
  • Lake coordinates and elevations: USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), cross-referenced with NPS mapping data and verified against satellite imagery
  • Lake names: Official NPS/USGS names; informal community names noted where they exist; 150 lakes individually curated and verified against NPS lake count data
  • Trailhead distances and difficulty ratings: NPS trail guides; difficulty simplified to Easy / Moderate / Hard based on distance, elevation gain, and trail character
  • Lake descriptions: Hand-curated from NPS pages and community sources
  • Map basemap (roads, trails, water, labels): Protomaps — OpenStreetMap-derived vector tiles, self-hosted on S3 as a single PMTiles archive
  • Terrain, hillshade & contour lines: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen Terrarium encoding, public domain elevation data derived from USGS 3DEP, SRTM, and other sources), self-hosted as individual tiles
  • Map renderer: MapLibre GL JS (open source, BSD license)
  • Lake photos: Curated from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons and public domain licenses; photographer credit on each lake page where available
  • Park boundary data: OpenStreetMap (used for in-bounds verification during lake catalog research)

Data accuracy is a priority but not guaranteed. If you spot an error — wrong coordinates, misspelled name, bad distance — please let us know using the form below.

Feedback

Have a suggestion, correction, or just want to share something? Leave a note below.