Indian Peaks, Colorado

Serrated ridges and jagged peaks characterize the Indian Peaks Wilderness. The range is easily identifiable from the Denver area, its sawtooth profile running south from massive, blocky Longs Peak too the rounded hump of James Peak. The granite peaks, a continuation of a mountainous landscape that begins in Rocky Mountain National Park, owe their dramatic sculpted form to the action of glaciers. Indian Peaks contains a handful of remnant glaciers, considered by some to be the southernmost permanent glaciers in North America. Below these ice fields, most valleys contain other glacial remnants - turquoise lakes that formed in moraines (rock debris left by retreating glaciers) or in depressions created as glaciers scoured rock and earth. Nearly 50 such lakes dot the Indian Peaks, many just a short distance from readily accessible trailheads.