Lake Agnes Cabin is a one-room log cabin about a half-mile north of Lake Agnes in the Never Summer Mountains. Built in 1925, the cabin was intended to provide accommodations for a boys’ summer camp and was later used by forest rangers in the area. Today it is in State Forest State Park and is maintained by park staff.
Lake Agnes lies at an elevation of about 10,700 feet in a cirque flanked by Mt. Mahler, Mt. Richthofen, and the Nokhu Crags at the northern end of the Never Summer Mountains. In the 1920s, former Arapaho National Forest ranger Frank Poley started a boys’ summer camp based at the lake. According to a brochure, the rustic camp was designed to introduce boys aged twelve to twenty-one to “real pioneer life.” The boys spent all of July and August at the lake, where they rode horses, fished, camped, and cooked, all leading up to a long pack trip through nearby Rocky Mountain National Park.
Poley built Lake Agnes Cabin in 1925 as part of the camp’s facilities. In keeping with the camp’s rustic style, the small log cabin measured about twenty-two feet by eighteen-and-a-half feet. Poley constructed it using peeled lodgepole pine logs placed on top of rubble stone corner supports. He used a channel system for the corners of the cabin, meaning that the ends of the logs were attached to planks that formed an indented V. The channel system made construction easier and quicker because the log sizes did not need to match as closely as for notched and interlocked corners.
The simple one-room cabin was probably used to house campers. It had a plank porch off the south wall, where the main entrance was located, and one window on each of the other walls. Inside, the cabin had exposed log walls, wood rafters, and roof boards. The floor was made of pine planks.
Poley’s camp shut down after one of the campers drowned in Lake Agnes, but his facilities remained. For the rest of the twentieth century, rangers working with the National Park Service, US Forest Service, and State Forest State Park used the cabin in the summers, and it was also available for public rental. Originally in Arapaho National Forest, the cabin became part of State Forest State Park in the 1970s.
Since 2000 the cabin has been closed to the public, but it continues to be maintained by state park staff and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. About a mile south of State Highway 14 on the west side of Cameron Pass, the cabin can be reached in the summer via a dirt road that runs to the cabin and forms a circular parking area beside the building. From there visitors can hike a short trail to Lake Agnes.
