Stay in Grand Lake just north of Winter Park. Use it to do day runs North to the west gate area of Rocky Mountain Nat’l Park which you might visit with warm clothes. Grand Lake is a nice little town on a stunning lake.
To the south within 40 minutes is Winter Park, Fraser and Granby in reverse order. Nice ski towns. You can go west of Fraser and drop small top water spinners and flys in the small rivers in the research forest area 20 minutes from Fraser.
Between Grand Lake and Granby you have Shadow Mtn lake and Granby Lake.
Like much of the Rockys there is a lot of evergreen killed by cyclic insect kill. I think its at the peak of a 70 year die back from beatles.
Funny you should mention Grand Lake, because I was just checking out the Western Riviera. Seems like a good central location.
I really didn’t know anything about the evergreen kill until I posted this thread. It sounds pretty bad. In Texas, we have the pine bark beetle, which I assume is a similar problem. It doesn’t seem to be as severe as it used to be. I imagine that periodic forest fires are nature’s way of taking care of these things.