Autumn's Tarn - Original

The Old Norse word tjörn names a small, deep lake carved into a mountain hollow by retreating glaciers, fed by snowmelt rather than a river, often sitting high above the tree line. These cirque lakes — still, cold, and startlingly blue — are scattered through the high country of the Rocky Mountains.

This piece was inspired from a recent backpacking trip through that high country near Creede, Colorado, arriving at one of these alpine tarns just as the aspens along its banks had turned gold. Beneath the surface swam native cutthroat trout — the Rockies' original fish, long crowded out in many drainages by introduced rainbow and brook trout. In recent years, the Forest Service and its partners have worked to reverse that, removing the non-native fish from select high-alpine waters and reintroducing cutthroat to their ancestral lakes — a quiet act of restoration playing out in some of the wildest, least-visited water in the country.

Autumn's Tarn holds both of those things at once: the turning season above the surface, and the slow return of something native beneath it.

 Year Created: 2026