Lake Isabel is a reservoir located in the

San Isabel National Forest San Isabel National Forest is located in central Colorado. The forest contains 19 of the state's 53 fourteeners, peaks over high, including Mount Elbert, the highest point in Colorado. It is one of eleven national forests in the state of Color ...

Pueblo In the Southwestern United States, Pueblo (capitalized) refers to the Native tribes of Puebloans having fixed-location communities with permanent buildings which also are called pueblos (lowercased). The Spanish explorers of northern New Spain ...

and

Custer George Armstrong Custer (December 5, 1839 – June 25, 1876) was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars. Custer graduated from West Point in 1861 at the bottom of his class, b ...

counties, in

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

, United States. The lake is in the

Wet Mountains The Wet Mountains are a small mountain range in southern Colorado, named for the amount of snow they receive in the winter as compared to the dried Great Plains to the east. They are a sub-range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in the southern R ...

. The lake is open to fishing year round and is regularly stocked by

Colorado Parks and Wildlife Colorado Parks and Wildlife manages the state parks system and the wildlife of the U.S. state of Colorado. , the division managed the 42 state parks and 307 wildlife areas of Colorado. , the Colorado Natural Areas Program had 93 designated si ...

. Available activities include fishing, hiking, camping and sledding in the winter. The community of San Isabel lies on the north side of the lake, in Custer County. The border between Pueblo and Custer counties runs north–south through the east side of the lake, such that most of the dam is in Pueblo County (on the east side), and most of the reservoir itself is in Custer County (on the west side).

History

The earthen dam and reservoir were built in the 1930s to store water for the CF&I Steel plant in

. Now the lake and the area surrounding it are managed by the United States Forest Service as the Lake Isabel Recreation Area.

References

Isabel Isabel is a female name of Spanish origin. Isabelle is a name that is similar, but it is of French origin. It originates as the medieval Spanish form of '' Elisabeth'' (ultimately Hebrew ''Elisheva''), Arising in the 12th century, it became popul ...

Bodies of water of Pueblo County, Colorado

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