Travel + Leisure has published “This Colorado Wilderness Lodge Feels Like Staying in Your Own Private National Park—With Access to 50 Miles of Trails and 2 Alpine Lakes,” the first review of Trinchera Reserve & Lodge since the reserve opened to all guests earlier this year. Go-to adventure journalist Jen Murphy, a writer who has spent her career on the kind of trips most people only read about, was on the assignment. She and her partner drove three and a half hours south from Denver and came down the cottonwood-lined driveway in time for cocktail hour.

Murphy frames the story around Trinchera’s high alpine safari concept, which lets guests combine activities to their own interests and adventure level. She and her partner are hikers, so they had their daily itinerary programmed around being on foot most of the time.

Those days began at The Lodge, designed by Santa Fe-based Los Griegos Studio, the firm behind Montana’s Ranch at Rock Creek. Murphy describes it as a tribute to the American West, something between an art gallery and a natural history museum, its nooks holding Native American relics, mountain lion skeletons and bighorn sheep skulls, Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter, and Western landscapes by the American painter Maynard Dixon.

In the bar of the Great Room, they toasted with a group just off Mount Lindsey, one of three 14ers on the property, then joined conservation and sustainability manager Judy Lopez for an hour-long walk of the grounds. They paused at a crystal-clear creek, where Lopez told them about the decade-long effort to return native Rio Grande cutthroat trout to 200 miles of creeks, streams, and ponds. She called it the Reserve’s most significant achievement. It is also the reason catch-and-release fishing is one of the star activities here.

They could have driven to water in one of the Reserve’s Grenadiers. They took the climb instead, pairing their fishing excursion with an all-day trek that ran three hard miles through piñon woodland into the high alpine, past columbine and Indian paintbrush, and ended at Winchell Lake at 12,700 feet in the Sangre de Cristos, where the fish were biting.

Anticipating their exhaustion, the team left muscle rub by the bed. Dinner that evening was elk chops and a garden-harvested salad on the terrace, and the night ended with the resident astronomy expert under a dark sky.

Over the days that followed, they mountain biked downhill, picnicked at backcountry outposts, and went out on wildlife drives that turned up a black bear, wild horses, mule deer, and a herd of elk with their calves. Every evening brought them back to other guests at The Lodge. Out on the land, across 172,000 acres, they encountered no one. In her words: “we never saw another human out in the field.”

From there, the review turns back to The Lodge, the Reserve’s private residences, and the backcountry outposts. Each of the 16 rooms at The Lodge has the feel of a cabin and the comfort of home, with original Navajo textiles, cowhide and leather club chairs, and artifacts down to a vintage bow and arrow. Fourteen of the rooms have patios, and three parlor rooms connect for families. For more privacy, there are the private residences. Murphy notes that the four-bedroom Cat Mountain House sits secluded at 8,750 feet and is still a short drive from The Lodge, while the five-bedroom Lake House looks out at all three peaks and can be staffed with a private chef. Of the three backcountry outposts, she singled out the Stone Cabin, reachable only on foot, where a sauna, hot tub, and cold plunge wait at the end of the walk in.

On the dining front, Murphy reports on the let-the-land-lead philosophy behind Chef [FIRST LAST]’s kitchen. Lunches on the go ranged from pasta salad, prosciutto and cheese on soft ciabatta, and peanut butter cookies eaten above an alpine lake, to one afternoon that took them to a remote cabin for a Mediterranean spread. Cocktail hour rotated nightly between the Great Room bar and The Overlook terrace, over charcuterie and drinks like a raspberry Old Fashioned. Dinners came three courses in the art-filled dining room or outside on the patio, Alaskan halibut with orzo one night. Murphy called the wine list impressive, and they opened a special bottle alongside each meal.

Murphy also covers wellness at Trinchera. Most of it happens outside, with the body in motion and no reason to reach for a screen, and the rest sits steps from The Lodge in the historic schoolhouse, transformed into a yoga studio and fitness center equipped with everything from stability balls and resistance bands to dumbbells and cardio machines, with two massage rooms and a deck holding a sauna, hot tub, and cold plunge.

Two days after the review ran, Murphy posted from the Reserve to her own audience. She wrote that few places have left her as speechless or as worn out by the adventure, and counted what a guest gets here: three 14ers, high alpine lakes, singletrack, and backcountry huts to use as basecamps for overnights. A week, she wrote, barely covers it. She is already planning the return.

See Jen’s Instagram post here.

Read the full review in Travel + Leisure →