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

  • 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.