Round Trip Distance: 0.8 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 9459 - 9487 feet
Cellphone: 0 bars
Time: 30 mins.
Trailhead: Twin Meadows
Fee: none
Attractions: Scenic mountain lakes
Twin Meadows is a scenic open primitive camping area in the White River National Forest east of Basalt, Colorado that has several lakes, or ponds, that are popular for fishing and watersports like paddle boarding and swimming. It is also the location of the Sawyer Lake and Aspen-Norrie trailheads. This post is for an unnamed trail that travels around the meadow's lakes.
From Basalt head up the valley on the Fryingpan River Road to mile marker 28 and turn right at the Norrie Colony.
Follow the well maintained road as it climbs steeply at first out of the valley and turn right at the fork at the 3.3 mile point that leads into Twin Meadows.
For this post we started out at the south end of the meadows area at the Sawyer Lake trailhead.
Rather than heading up the Sawyer Lake trail we went due west for about 100 feet and picked up the trail entering the trees near one of the campsites.
The trail passes through the trees with a lake on the right and an irrigation ditch on the left. As the trail comes out of the trees it looks across another large meadow that isn't visible from the trailhead.
There is easy access in this area to the banks of the largest of the 3 lakes.
From there you can continue around the west side of the lakes by following the trail on top of the berm.
Several nice clumps of Indian tobacco can be spotted growing along the ditch. Take a close look in the water and you might also see scores of fingerling trout swimming about.
As the route reaches the north end of the loop it meets up with the Aspen-Norrie trail which you can follow around the lake to its trailhead.
From there it is a straight shot between the lakes and the camping area to get back to where we started out.
There is plenty of room around Twin Meadows to park trailers or set up a tent. Currently there are no facilities of any kind and there are no designated campsites. Everyone simply finds a spot where there is a comfortable amount of space between them and the next guy and setup camp. People seem to do an excellent job cleaning up after themselves.
