Overlays for the routes I have climbed at Lost World. Photos of these routes are given in the trip reports on this page.

Fern Canyon represents the two miles of terrain between the west end of Morraine Park and the confluence of Fern Creek and Spurce Creek with the Big Thompson River. The Fern Lake Trail wanders up this forested canyon and reveals a fairly impressive line of cliffs to the north. Relatively few climbers visit these crags, instead drawn to the bigger objectives in the area. However, this area is a good place for some sunny low-commitment or earlier-season climbing in RMNP. The most popular zones of climbing are Rock of Ages and The Lost World. This page is for climbs I have done at The Lost World, a group of domes and buttress on the mountainside north of The Pool. I have another page for Rock of Ages.

So far, I have only been to the Lost World once, in June 2023.

Nate and I were itching to get into the alpine, but it had been an unseasonably wet and cool spring, and it was not quite warm enough to head up high. The Lost World in Fern Canyon—where I had never been and wanted to check out—sounded like a good place for a cool June Sunday. The timed entry system makes last minute trips into RMNP uncertain, but fortunately we managed to secure an elusive timed entry permit.

After perusing the guidebook descriptions and topos, we decided to start the day by linking up Welcome to the Jungle (5.9, 2p) on Moot Point Apron with Colossus Crack (5.8 R, 2p) on The Colossus. But our plans were a bit thwarted by conditions. The corner on the first pitch of Welcome to the Jungle ended up being quite vegetated and wet (the route is apparently appropriately named), so we wisely backed off of this and instead scrambled up to The Colossus. Due to an error on the guidebook topo mis-labeling the location of Colossus Crack, we explored around a bit. Once we located Colossus Crack we climbed the first pitch—which I thought was engaging and quality climbing at the grade—but the wind was whipping around the arete so we lowered off a couple of fixed nuts already up there. Next, we went and collected our gear we had left on Welcome to the Jungle (we created an anchor at the top of Moot Point Apron, fixed the rope, I rapped down to the ground, and then Nate belayed me up, which resulted in a fun 200-foot pitch of climbing for me). After some lunch and feeling the need to do a route to completion, we climbed Night of the Unicorn (5.8, 3p) on Gnome Dome. This moderate route had some good rock and fun climbing. After a rather tedious descent down a gully I wouldn't recommend, we enjoyed a flowery hike out.

Overall, this was quite a fun day of exploring and climbing with my favorite partner. I thought the climbing was just okay, but the sublime and crowd-free (we were the only ones there) nature of the Lost World area made up for it.

Below are some photos from my first visit to the Lost World. The photos are organized by climb. Approach photos are given in the Night of the Unicorn section.