Escaping The Nutshell

For many years we had searched for Aquilla Cook’s grave on Cook Mountain to no avail. Recently we came across the story of Aquilla Cook’s death by Silvia Pettem at the Daily Camera. By the way, she’s written some wonderful books on the history of Boulder County. In that story, she mentioned a marker in the mountains where he died. This we knew must be on Cook Mountain, and an internet search got us the coordinates of the marker. We’re unable to again find the web page with those coordinates, but using that point typed into a GPS got us to find the marker on Cook Mountain. The point is:
40.21785, -105.39939, elev 7164 ft, accuracy 23 ft

Silvia Pettem, in her story, says that Aquilla Cook is not buried on Cook Mountain like we thought, but is in Hygiene Cemetery. If you want to visit the grave, it’s on the south side of Hygiene Road, near the west boundary of the cemetery. The cemetery spans both sides of Hygiene Road, and the north side of the road has a church with the cemetery surrounding it.

For this hike we started at the Button Rock Preserve parking area, hiking west on Longmont Dam Road, taking the right branch of the road after about a mile, then the left branch after the steel bridge which took us by the ranger station, then the north shore of Ralph Price Reservoir.

We followed the trail west along the north shore of the reservoir. The trail ends at a dirt road on the west side of the reservoir, where we turned left (south) onto it as it headed uphill along the southeast slope of Cook Mountain. We departed the dirt road when the GPS indicated that our destination point was just west of us, heading across trackless meadow interspersed with ponderosa pine.

It took us a little while to find the marker, but we did. It is cemented onto a boulder that they apparently found him lying on. The marker indicates that his body was there for 3 years before it was found. The views from the boulder where he was found are fantastic. You can see Coffintop Mountain to the southeast and Ralph Price Reservoir to the east. Of course in 1868, he couldn’t see the reservoir as it wasn’t there yet.

From the marker we headed west up to the summit of Cook Mountain, then on the return, descended the mountain along its north ridge, which meets a forest road that took us to a forest road intersection, where we turned right (east) to return to the reservoir via mostly forest roads.

We’re not able to download data from our old GPS, but we drew the approximate route in Google Maps.

Below are more pictures of the hike.

Our video of the hike on YouTube

or alternatively at archive.org