Devils Head Lookout Trail

You’ve probably already looked at it. From Castle Rock it’s a well-known shape on the western skyline. Up close it’s a granite outcrop at 9,748 feet, the tallest mountain in the Rampart Range, with a small wood-frame building bolted to the top of it and 143 steps running up the rock to reach it.

Trail numbers are the Forest Service’s own, from the Trail #611 and Devils Head Lookout Tower pages. AllTrails and Wikipedia both put the gain nearer 950 feet. I hiked it this summer and my watch logged 3.26 miles and a bit over 1,000 feet with some extra scrambling around the rocks at the top.

Why It's Called Devils Head

The name goes back to prospectors in the late 1800s, and it does not come from the side you see from town. From the southwest, looking back northeast, the rock reads as a face lying flat and staring up, and the accounts say you can still pick out horns. Trees have grown in since and softened it; there used to be a much more obvious eye socket. An explorer first noted the site officially in 1869, and the mountain carried a string of other names on the maps before Devils Head became the official one in 1923.

There’s a poem posted on the mountain, “The Mountain,” written by Margaret Ann Hughes Ellis in 1991, that puts it better than a guidebook can: “Only God could have made this place, even tho’ it has a devil’s face.” She wasn’t a visitor passing through. She lived below this rock for decades while her husband staffed the tower — more on that below.

The Hike

1.4 miles up, 143 steps at the end, and a cabin most people walk past without knowing what it is.

Trail #611 starts at the picnic area next to Devils Head Campground and ends in the meadow underneath the tower. It climbs steadily through aspen and pine, winding past big granite formations the whole way, with shaded benches scattered along the route if you need to catch your breath. It’s shaded for most of the climb, which makes it a good warm-weather option too. It gains almost all of its elevation in under a mile and a half.

One thing the numbers hide: altitude. Do the Forest Service’s own math and the trailhead sits around 8,880 feet, and you finish at 9,748. Short and steep at that elevation is a different animal than short and steep at home, and if you live down in the county you are not acclimated to it. Nobody who takes it slow up here is doing it wrong. Plenty of people work the trail with poles, and a fit group that pushes the pace will still want to stop. Budget more time than 2.8 miles sounds like it needs.

Near the top the trail opens into a meadow and you come out at the base of the granite. The small building on your left there is not a shelter you can go into. It’s the lookout’s cabin. The Forest Service built it in 1951, and in season the person working the tower lives in it. The sign at the foot of the stairs reads “143 steps above cabin” for exactly that reason.

Then the part everyone remembers: 143 steps pinned up the side of the rock to the lookout. Take it slow. It’s exposed and it’s the steepest thing you’ll do all day, and expect to wait your turn: the Forest Service posts a limit at the bottom of no more than five people on or in the tower at a time.

Local tip: go early. The main lot holds 25 cars and fills by mid-morning on a good day, and parking along the dirt road blocks emergency access. The signed overflow lot is about a half-mile walk out.

Outlaws, Buried Loot, and Pink Granite

At 9,748 feet, Devils Head is the tallest mountain in the Rampart Range. The interpretive sign on the trail tells it this way: in the 1870s there was no trail to the top, and the wild forest and granite outcroppings made it a favorite hideout for outlaws and bandits.

The story the Forest Service prints on the mountain: train robbers hid their loot in the woods under a marked tree and ran from the posse behind them. Years later one of them came back for it and found that a forest fire had incinerated the marked tree. Nobody has produced the loot since. The sign is blunt about the obvious follow-up thought, so we will be too: historic and pre-historic artifacts are protected by federal law. Admire the story, leave the ground alone.

The rock itself is part of the appeal. The boulders and formations along the trail run light pink to almost red, and per the sign the color is down to heavy amounts of microcline feldspar and various iron minerals running through it. It’s Pikes Peak Granite, which formed over a billion years ago and cooled slowly enough to grow crystals about a centimeter across, which is also why so much of it is crumbly underfoot. Pikes Peak itself, thirty miles south, is made of almost nothing else.

Ladybugs, Ant Swarms, and Four Kinds of Conifer

The climb runs through mixed aspen and pine, and one of the interpretive signs walks you through the conifers you are actually looking at: Douglas-fir, Engelmann spruce, limber pine and ponderosa pine, with the needle counts to tell them apart. It’s worth thirty seconds. Most people blow past it and then spend the rest of the hike calling everything “a pine tree.”

The strange one has its own sign up there. In late spring and early summer, native convergent ladybugs migrate to Devils Head and form mass colonies to breed. The sign’s words: look closely and you might find thousands of these red beetles hiding from predators in the cracks within the rocks or in the tall grass. One found me at the top. Hikers who hit it right describe the summit as crawling with them. It’s normal, and it passes.

Then, from late July into early September, harvester ant colonies produce winged ants called alates, which swarm to start new colonies. The big mounds of sand and pebbles all over the mountain are theirs. The sign is explicit that they pose no harm to you, your food, or the lookout itself.

The Fire Lookout, and Whether You Can Get In It

Devils Head is a working fire lookout, and the U.S. Forest Service calls it the last full-time lookout in Colorado. It sits at 9,748 feet, it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it has been in continuous use since 1912.

Here is the part most write-ups skip. The Forest Service’s wording is that the lookout “may be open to public visitation when staffed,” and that the tower is typically staffed only from late May through early September. The 143 steps and the wooden deck wrapping the cab are open to anyone. The old sign at the bottom still says “you may climb it if you wish.” But getting inside the cab depends entirely on someone being up there to let you in. I hiked it this summer, squarely inside the staffed window, and the cab was shut with nobody up in it. Go for the climb and the view. Treat the inside as a bonus, not the plan.

What you get either way is the view. The sign near the top spells it out: on clear days it runs over one hundred miles in every direction, with Denver to the north, Pikes Peak to the south, Kansas to the east, and the Continental Divide to the west. The Colorado Encyclopedia stretches the list further, to the Spanish Peaks in the south and Longs Peak and southeastern Wyoming in the north, and notes that on a clear day a lookout can spot a fire up to seventy-five miles away.

The history is better than the building lets on. In 1907, the newly created Forest Service planned seven principal lookouts running the Front Range from New Mexico to Wyoming. Only four were ever built: Devils Head, Twin Sisters near Estes Park, Squaw Peak west of Denver near Mount Blue Sky, and Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming. Devils Head is the last of those four still in continuous use, and the tower you climb today went up in 1951. It’s not a replica and it’s not a viewpoint. It’s a lookout that’s been doing the same job for over a century.

Helen Dowe, and How the Tower Got Up There

The first station, in 1912, was barely a station: a fire finder, a table bolted to the rock, a guardrail, and a small shed with a telephone. Getting to it meant a full day’s pack trip from Watson Park, so in 1913–14 the Forest Service built a horse barn and a one-room log cabin down at Devils Half Acre, the clearing at the base of the granite.

Then the war changed who worked here. With men in short supply after 1917, a thirty-year-old Denver Times employee named Helen Dowe applied to be a lookout in 1919 and got it. She worked three seasons at Devils Head, 1919 to 1921, assisted in her first year by Nina St. John of Ottawa, Kansas and in 1920 by her aunt. National magazines picked it up, and she received thousands of letters from women, many of whom applied for lookout work themselves. A Denver Post writer put it plainly in 1920: “She has demonstrated that a woman is fully as efficient as a man as a forest fire lookout, probably more so.”

One correction worth making, because plenty of places get it wrong. Dowe is often called the first female fire lookout in the United States, and the Colorado Encyclopedia says exactly that. She was not. Hallie Morse Daggett took a lookout job at Eddy Gulch in California’s Klamath National Forest in 1913, six years earlier, and worked it for fifteen seasons; Smithsonian describes Dowe as following in Daggett’s footsteps, and Intermountain Histories calls her plainly “the second woman in United States history to staff an official forest fire lookout.” The Forest Service’s own timeline sign on this trail gets it right and calls Dowe Colorado’s first female lookout. That is the claim we stand behind.

The tower standing there now went up in 1951, and the way it got built is worth knowing. That June, 100 members of the 973rd Construction Battalion out of Fort Carson dismantled the 1919 observatory, hauled the materials in by mule to Devils Half Acre, then lifted them by hand up the side of the granite. They finished in September. That fall the same crew built a new ranger cabin and two outhouses, installed the staircase, and cut the 1.4-mile trail you hike today. Before that, rangers got up the rock on a log with steps cut into it and a wooden ladder.

It was listed on the National Register in 2003 and marked 100 years of continuous use in 2012. HistoriCorps volunteers have been restoring the tower and the cabin roof since 2013. The site now takes more than 15,000 visits a year.

Billy and Margaret Ellis

Thirty-five seasons in the tower, six kids raised in a cabin below it, and the poem on the sign.

For most of the last forty years, the person in that tower was Billy Ellis. He started as a relief lookout in 1966, took it on full time in 1984, and retired in 2019 at eighty-seven — 35 seasons, and more than two hundred fires spotted. When he stepped down, he was working what 5280 called one of Colorado’s last human-staffed fire towers.

He was not up there by himself. His wife Margaret was with him for 29 of 32 summers as of 2017, and the two of them raised six of their nine children in a two-room cabin in the meadow below the granite — the same clearing the Forest Service built on back in 1913. There is no road to it. They hiked down for groceries once a week or every other week. While Billy watched for smoke, Margaret worked the trail, telling hikers the history of the lookout and what women had done for firefighting in Colorado. At one point six people in the family were working for the district.

Which brings it back around. The poem on the sign partway up the trail is hers. Margaret Ann Hughes Ellis wrote “The Mountain” in 1991, living underneath the tower her husband staffed.

She wrote to us after this piece went up. “I saw where you had been up to Devils Head. I’m Margaret Ellis, my husband Billy and I were the fire lookouts up there from 1984–2019, retiring at ages 87 and 78. I wrote that poem.” We had already put her name on this page from the sign, without knowing she was the one who had lived here.

Her retirement may also answer something I could not when I hiked it. The National Historic Lookout Register noted at the time that when Ellis retired the position might not be filled at all, with cameras used instead. I do not have confirmation either way, but it is the most likely reason the cab was shut and nobody was up there.

Devils Head in the Fall

Straight up: I haven't been up here in the fall. Here's what the people who have say.

Everything on this page is from a summer hike, and the photos are summer photos. So take the fall section as other people’s reporting, not mine.

Devils Head turns up on basically every “fall hikes near Denver” list, and the trail guides are specific about why: the route climbs through aspen. 10Adventures tells you outright to “hike the Devils Head Lookout Trail in the autumn — the colors of the changing aspen trees from the lookout are truly breathtaking.” Day Hikes Near Denver carries it on its aspen list too. Both have fall photos worth a look before you commit the drive.

Timing is the open question this year. CBS Colorado is telling people to move the usual leaf trip up about a week, because a hot, dry year has left more than three quarters of the state in severe drought or worse and stressed aspens turn early. Their viewing windows put the mountains west of Denver at September 13 to 24 and Pikes Peak and the southern Front Range at September 23 to October 3. Devils Head sits between the two at 9,748 feet, so I’d watch it. When we go back in the fall, this section gets rewritten with our own photos.

Chasing color elsewhere too? See our full guide to fall colors in Douglas County, and everything happening in fall and Halloween events.

Know Before You Go

• Getting there: from Sedalia, Highway 85 to State Highway 67 west about 10 miles to Rampart Range Road, then south about 8.5 miles to the trailhead. The last stretch is maintained dirt, fine for most cars but washboarded, so go slow.
• Season: Rampart Range Road (#300) closes to vehicles annually by December 1 and stays shut all winter. The Forest Service targets April 1 to reopen, but weather can push it to late May.
• Tower hours: the lookout is open to the public only while it’s staffed, typically late May through early September, and even then it’s not guaranteed. The stairs and the deck are open regardless. Limit is five people on or in the tower at a time.
• Lightning is the real risk, and it’s not hypothetical. On Sunday, June 30, 2019, lightning struck a party of eight climbers and a dog at the Chicken Head Ranch climbing area on Devils Head. Three adults were struck; seven of the party walked out and the eighth was evacuated by litter carry, per Douglas County Search and Rescue. That was a climbing area rather than this trail, but it was the same mountain on a summer afternoon, and the tower is the highest object around for miles. If there’s any hint of storms in the forecast, go a different day. Afternoon storms build fast up here.
• Parking: the Forest Service says the main trailhead lot fits 25 cars. Don’t park along the dirt road, it blocks emergency access. The signed overflow lot is about a half-mile walk from the trailhead.
• Restrooms: vault toilets at Devils Head Campground, at the base of the trail. No potable water at the site, so bring your own.
• Cell service is spotty. Download your map before you leave pavement.
• Pack a lunch. There’s a meadow and boulders near the top that make a good spot to sit.
• Dogs: leashed on the trail, but not allowed on the tower stairs or inside the lookout. If you bring one, somebody waits at the bottom.
• Hours: parking and trail use are limited to one hour before sunrise through one hour after sunset. No overnight camping and no campfires at the trailhead.
• Ratings, reviews, and a map pin for the trailhead are also on our Devils Head Lookout directory listing.

Where This Came From

Trail stats, road closures, parking, dog rules and tower staffing come from the Forest Service. The outlaw story, the poem, the granite, the ladybugs and the ant swarms are transcribed from the interpretive signs on the mountain, photographed on site. The history is the Colorado Encyclopedia, which cites the property’s National Register nomination. Where sources disagree, we have said so in the text.

• U.S. Forest Service — Devil’s Head Lookout Tower (Pike-San Isabel National Forests)
• U.S. Forest Service — Devil’s Head Trail #611
• U.S. Forest Service — Devil’s Head Campground (restrooms, water, fees)
• Colorado Encyclopedia — Devils Head Lookout
• Smithsonian — Female Fire Lookouts Have Been Saving the Wilderness for Over a Century (Hallie Morse Daggett, 1913)
• Clio — Devil’s Head Lookout (1869, the naming)
• Wikipedia — Devils Head (summit) (the face from the southwest; the 1923 name change, via GNIS) and Devil’s Head Lookout (National Register listing, June 13, 2003)
• CBS Colorado — Colorado fall colors could arrive early in 2026 (drought, and the viewing windows)
• Intermountain Histories (Northern Arizona University) — Devil’s Head Lookout (Dowe as the second woman in the country)
• 5280 — The Watchman (Billy Ellis interview, 2017 — 1966 start, 1984 full time, Margaret for 29 of 32 summers, nine children)
• National Historic Lookout Register — Devil’s Head Lookout (Margaret’s visitor-education role, six of nine children in the cabin, and the note that the post might not be refilled after Ellis)
• Correspondence — Margaret Ann Hughes Ellis to DougCo Social, August 2026, confirming she wrote “The Mountain” and that she and Billy staffed the lookout 1984–2019
• 9NEWS — 3 injured after lightning strikes near group of climbers at Devil’s Head (June 30, 2019), quoting Douglas County Search and Rescue. Note: several secondary write-ups of this incident report “eight injured,” which appears to come from misreading the party size. DCSAR says three adults were struck.
• Interpretive signs on the Devils Head trail, USDA Forest Service — photographed on site, summer 2026

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