The Mount Evans Wilderness is a U.S. Wilderness Area located in Arapaho National Forest

Arapaho National Forest

Arapaho National Forest is a National Forest located in north-central Colorado, United States. The facility is managed jointly with the Roosevelt National Forest and the Pawnee National Grassland from the United States Forest Service office in Fort Collins, Colorado...

 and Pike National Forest

Pike National Forest

The Pike National Forest is located in the Front Range of Colorado, USA, west of Colorado Springs and including Pikes Peak. The forest encompasses 1,106,604 acres within Clear Creek, Teller, Park, Jefferson, Douglas and El Paso counties. The major rivers draining the forest are the South Platte...

 about 40 miles west of Denver, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

The City and County of Denver is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is a consolidated city-county, located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...

. The wilderness area is named after Mount Evans

Mount Evans

Mount Evans is a mountain in the Front Range region of the Rocky Mountains, in Clear Creek County, Colorado. It is one of 54 fourteeners in Colorado, and the closest fourteener to Denver...

.

History

The first efforts to protect the Mount Evans area
involved the purchase of Echo Lake Park

Echo Lake Park

Echo Lake Park is a park located along the Mount Evans Scenic Byway about west of Denver, Colorado. The park provides a stone shelter with picnic tables and barbecue grills on one end of the lake, and the 1926 Echo Lake Lodge and an Arapaho National Forest campground are found at the other...

 and
Summit Lake Park

Summit Lake Park

Summit Lake Park is a park located along Mount Evans Scenic Byway about 38 miles west of Denver, Colorado. The park is 160 acres in size and contains alpine tundra. Land to the east of the lake is in a state of permafrost which helps to prevent drainage of the area...

 as part of the system of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was an American landscape architect best known for his wildlife conservation efforts. He had a lifetime commitment to national parks, and worked on projects in Acadia, the Everglades and Yosemite National Park. Olmsted Point in Yosemite and Olmsted Island at Great Falls...

 for the Denver Mountain Parks

Denver Mountain Parks

The Denver Mountain Parks system contains more than 14,000 acres of parklands in the mountains and foothills of Jefferson, Clear Creek, Douglas,and Grand counties in Colorado, west and south of Denver....

. This effort led to a proposal for a National Park

National park

A national park is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or owns. Although individual nations designate their own national parks differently A national park is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or...

 overlapping, to a significant extent, what is now the Mount Evans Wilderness Area.

The first large tract of land in what is now the Mount Evans Wilderness area to be formally protected was the Abyss Lake Scenic Area in Pike National Forest, protecting the Abyss Lake cirque and much of the Lake Fork of Scot Gomer Creek, a tributary of Geneva Creek

Geneva Creek (Colorado)

Geneva Creek is a short tributary of the North Fork South Platte River, approximately long, in central Colorado in the United States. It drains part of the Rocky Mountains southwest of Denver in northern Park County. It rises at the continental divide west of Mount Bierstadt and descends through a...

that drains the south side of Mount Evans. This area was designated prior to 1955.