Brown Lake

Difficulty: Hard
Trip Type: Multi-Day Backpacking / Day Hike
Distance: ~9 miles from trailhead / ~0.8 miles from Silver Lake
Elevation: 8,906 feet
Coordinates: 45.20778, -109.87405
Time: ~1 hour from Nugget Lake
Access: Extremely rugged cross-country descent. Departs via high ridge from Nugget Lake.
Bugs: Minimal (little to no bugs)

Getting there

Drive along West Rosebud Road past Emerald Lake and West Rosebud Lake. The trailhead parking lot is located just before you reach the power plant near the end of the road, providing ample parking space for standard vehicles.

The hike

If you are visiting this destination on a direct line from the vehicle turnaround, the route to Brown Lake spans roughly 9 miles and involves almost 3,100 vertical feet of elevation gain. This mileage baseline tracks a separate path up the valley that completely bypasses the higher loops at Frenco, Beckworth, and Nugget Lakes. For backpackers exploring the area, Brown Lake sits about 0.8 miles away from your basecamp at Silver Lake.

If you are tracking sequentially along the full day loop from Nugget Lake, this is your final water stop on the way back down to camp. The lake is notoriously tricky to find. While the initial cross-country approach offers nice walking, the final quarter-mile section leading down around the water gets incredibly steep and is choked with heavy downfall timber.

Tips & safety

• Terrain Warning: The route from Brown Lake back down to Silver Lake is an intensely grueling cross-country descent. The terrain drops straight down through slippery, rocky shale and dense timber overgrowth. Rain makes this steep rock surface slick and highly dangerous. There is no best path to pick—you simply have to navigate carefully down through the brush to end the suffering.

• Foraging: If you pop out of the heavy timber near the bottom of the descent, you will likely stumble into dense patches of wild huckleberries scattered just above the Silver Lake camp.

• Camping: Good camping opportunities exist around the shoreline, though the surrounding deadfall can make finding perfectly flat ground a bit of a challenge, also getting to this lake with a full backpack would be a challenge in itself.

• Fishing: No official Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks data is listed for this basin, and we didn't catch any fish at this stop.