Lake Agnes

                                                      Lake Agnes, 10,666 feet (MODERATE)

Named for Agnes Zimmerman, pioneer

Getting to the trailhead:  Drive up the Poudre Canyon from Fort Collins on Highway 14 to Cameron Pass. About 2.5 miles past the pass, you will see a sign on the left for the Lake Agnes trail. Drive up the dirt road here (there will be a fee, as this is State Forest State Park land). In one mile, you will reach the trailhead. In winter, the dirt road is closed, but you can park just off the highway and snowshoe up. The Never Summer Nordic Hut system rents out lovely little yurts and cabins in this area -- Nokhu Hut on the Lake Agnes Road is my favorite.

The historic Keystone Hotel, which Aggie's father built in 1897

Roundtrip distance from the trailhead to the top of the hill: 2.3-4.3 miles RT

Elevation gain: 442 feet

Map: [to be included]

How to hike to Lake Agnes: 

1.  The trail is well-marked. If you choose to walk the dirt road (from Willey Lumber Camp), the first part is a gentle incline. Then, from the Agnes Lake trail, the trail zigzags up to the lake. The views of the Nokhu Crags and the other impressive, jagged peaks (all in the 12,000-foot range) are amazing.

2. If you want to extend your hike, descend to the Michigan Ditch Trail intersection (about halfway up the switchbacks) and hike the 3 miles to the American Lakes trail. Another 2.3 miles will take you up to the American Lakes on the other side of the Nokhu Crags. A different option? Do as I did, and rent the Nokhu Hut on a wintery weekend in November, explore Lake Agnes, wave to a moose, and then return to the woodburning stove and a good book.

On the search for Agnes Zimmerman:

From Barbara Fleming's book Legendary Locals of Fort Collins -- L to R: John Zimmerman, unnamed guest, Eda Zimmerman, John McNabb, Agnes Zimmerman

Unlike so many of these other names, it was very easy to discover who Agnes of Agnes Lake was: The Colorado Encyclopedia says that “Lake Agnes is named after Agnes Zimmerman, the daughter of John Zimmerman, a homesteader in the area and the proprietor of the Keystone Hotel in Home, Colorado.” That sentence, more or less, is repeated in many different sources. From Findagrave.com, I discovered Agnes was born in December of 1880 and died on May 15, 1954, at age 73. She is buried at the Grandview Cemetery in Fort Collins in the Zimmerman plot.

Of course, I needed to know more. Who was Agnes? What kind of life did she live? Did she love her little gem of a lake at the base of the Nokhu Crags?

I learned from a historic structure assessment of the original Zimmerman Cabin at Lake Agnes that the cabin was built by John in 1882, about a year after he and his wife Marie Schmidt Zimmerman arrived with their four children from Minnesota. Both John and Marie had been born in Switzerland, but had emigrated as young people and had been raising their family in Minnesota. When they decided to venture west to homestead and mine for gold in Colorado, Marie was pregnant with Agnes, and their other three children -- Casper, Ed, and Eda -- were ten, eleven, and thirteen. Agnes was born in December on the covered wagon journey west, when the family wintered in Kansas. Agnes spent her first year bouncing west in the wagon pulled by two oxen; her second year, she toddled around a log cabin beside a lake her father named for her. 

At first, John Zimmerman believed he could strike rich with gold mining, but transportation of the ore from his homestead way up the Poudre River proved difficult and expensive. Instead, he turned to tourism: he built and opened the Keystone Hotel at milepost 84.5 of Highway 14. On July 22, 1897, when the hotel opened, the Fort Collins Courier reported the hotel was located in “one of the most picturesque locations imaginable . . . surrounded by some of the wildest and grandest of mountain views in the world.” It was such a success that Zimmerman ran a stage twice a week from Fort Collins -- the twelve-hour trip cost $3. Just a few years later, the Stanley Steamer cars and “mountain wagons” took the place of the stagecoaches. 

The hotel was large for the canyon: three stories of brick, with sixteen bedrooms. However, it could not keep up with the tourism industry drawing people elsewhere in Colorado. The blog Fort Collins Images notes that “after the Keystone Resort finally closed despite Agnes Zimmerman’s desperate attempts to keep it going, the land was acquired by the Colorado Department of Game and Fish, now the Colorado Division of Wildlife.” The hotel was torn down in 1946, replaced with the fishery that is still there.  

What was the story behind that phrase “desperate attempts to keep it going”? Agnes was 17 when the hotel was opened, and 66 when the hotel was bought and razed to the ground. What happened?

Then I stumbled upon an oral interview with Agnes’ nephew, Robert Casper Zimmerman, conducted in 1977 by a local Fort Collins historian for the Fort Collins Public Library. This kind of source is a history writer’s dream. I quickly discovered that Agnes was “Aggie” to those who knew her, and that she tried hard to keep the Keystone Hotel running after her father’s death in 1919. It was a serious struggle. Zimmerman told his interviewer that, in 1921, when “that road came in up Poudre Canyon,” it “killed the hotel business there” (pg 29). Suddenly, people didn’t need to stop at the Keystone Hotel at Milepost 84.5; they could zoom right by on up to North Park and beyond. Zimmerman said “after the automobile came,” it was harder to find and pay help in the hotel, so “Aggie did all the cooking” (pg 28, transcript). She would have been 41 at the time. She was unmarried. As Zimmerman explained, “I don’t know that Aggie ever had any intentions of ever marrying. If she did, I never heard of it” (pg 30). Her sister Eda did not marry, either.

For Aggie, who had grown into a woman in the beautiful hotel, the struggle to keep the business going must have been heartbreaking. An undated photograph published in Legendary Locals of Fort Collins, Colorado shows Aggie and her sister Eda reclining by the piano, listening with two guests as their father John reads something aloud. With a billiard hall and a barbershop, the hotel at its busiest must have been a haven of a resort. But just as Aggie tried to continue her father’s legacy, the construction of Highway 14 (“by the convicts,” Robert Casper Zimmerman said) ruined it. Her brother Edward died in 1931, and her sister Eda died in 1937. That left Aggie and the eldest, Casper, the only heirs. Zimmerman insisted in the interview that both wanted to sell the hotel to the Colorado Department of Game and Fish (some sources had suggested conflict between his father and Aggie). They just didn’t know, he said, that the plan was to tear down the historic place. “She never would have sold if she’d known they were going to tear it down,” Zimmerman said. “She never in the world would have sold it. She would have lived there and died there. They told her they were going to make a school for game wardens, training game wardens out of that place” (pg 20). Because she believed this, she wouldn’t allow any of the family to remove anything from the grand old hotel -- even the crystal, even the furniture. 

Instead, the buyer took everything and sold it at auction, then had the historic hotel razed to the ground in 1946. Aggie, Zimmerman said, “ran it right up until they sold it. If anybody came up there and wanted to stay, she would get them a meal” (pg 30). 

When the hotel sold, Zimmerman said, his aunt Aggie -- in her sixties -- traveled to Chicago to study art. “She was a wonderful artist,” he said (pg 30). She painted every wildflower in the canyon -- “she would go out and get the wildflowers in full bloom and bring it in and paint it. She was just unbelievable -- they were so good” (pg 30). Zimmerman had them, he told the historian, some framed and some “in the book that she had.” 

I hope, as Aggie lived her last nine years after the hotel’s destruction, that she painted her wildflowers and found some peace. I hope she traveled sometimes -- in cars faster than her father John could have ever imagined as he drove his oxen west to Colorado in 1880 -- up the Poudre Canyon to the trailhead for the little lake named for her. But maybe she just remembered it. After all, though her older sister Eda “wanted to be out fishing and hunting or tracking around the mountains all the time,” “Aggie was more of the domestic type. She wanted to stay around the hotel” (pg 7).