Fish Lake

The Fish Lake Plateau has long been part of the homeland of the Ute people, who camped, hunted, and fished at the lake for generations and knew it as a place of plenty. Southern Paiute people also ranged through the surrounding country. The lake's abundance of fish gave it its plain, fitting name, and it remained a gathering place through the seasons.

By the late 1800s and early 1900s the lake had become a popular mountain retreat for settlers escaping the summer heat of the valleys. The Forest Service and private operators built lodges and cabins along the shore, and the handsome log Fish Lake Lodge, raised in the 1930s, still stands as a centerpiece, its rustic architecture recalling the golden age of mountain resorts. Generations of families have returned to fish and camp here ever since.

Fish Lake fills a long, narrow basin on the high plateau, and unlike many Western reservoirs it is a natural lake, deep and cold and fed by mountain streams and springs. Its depth and elevation keep the water cool year-round, which is exactly what its trophy trout need, and the lake is large enough to hold big fish and support boating without ever feeling crowded.

The basin sits atop a volcanic plateau, part of a landscape shaped by ancient volcanic activity and later carved by ice-age glaciers and streams. The lake is ringed by broad meadows and forests of spruce, fir, and aspen that climb the surrounding ridges, and in the clear mountain air the whole scene, water, forest, and sky, feels crisp and vivid.

Above the lake grows Pando, an aspen grove whose name means I spread in Latin. What appears to be tens of thousands of individual aspen trees is actually one single male organism, genetically identical, all connected underground by one immense root system that sends up new trunks as older ones die. By total mass it is often called the heaviest known living organism, and it may be tens of thousands of years old.

Pando has become a symbol of both nature's wonder and its fragility. In recent decades much of the grove has struggled to send up new growth, as browsing deer and other pressures eat the young shoots before they can mature, and conservationists now work to fence and protect parts of it. Standing among its white trunks and quaking leaves, it is humbling to realize you are within a single living thing of almost unimaginable scale.

The plateau teems with life. Mule deer and elk browse the meadows, and the aspen and evergreen forests shelter beavers, porcupines, and a wealth of birds, from ospreys and eagles that fish the lake to woodpeckers drumming in the aspens. In the lake, the famous trout draw anglers from across the region in every season, including through the ice in winter.

Summer is the prime season, cool and green at this altitude when the valleys below bake, ideal for fishing, boating, and camping. Fall is spectacular, when the aspen groves, Pando among them, blaze gold across the plateau. Winter brings deep snow that closes much of the access, though ice fishing draws the hardy, and spring comes late and green as the snow finally melts off the high country.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.