Brown Lake (West Rosebud)

Drainage: West Rosebud
Approaches: Mystic Lake Trailhead — 9 mi, about 3,100 ft up, bypassing the upper loop · From Silver Lake — about 0.8 mi north, steep cross-country · From Nugget Lake — about 2.5 mi, descending

Elevation: 8,906 feet
Fish: No FWP data
Coordinates: 45.20778, -109.87405
Bugs: Minimal on our visit

Getting there

Drive West Rosebud Road past Emerald Lake and West Rosebud Lake. The trailhead lot sits just before the power plant at the end of the road, with plenty of room for a standard vehicle.

Reaching Brown directly is about nine miles with roughly 3,100 feet of climbing, going up the valley and skipping the higher lakes entirely. We came at it the other way, as the last stop on a long loop out of a camp at Silver Lake.

The hike

Brown was the final water on a day that started at Silver, climbed to Frenco, Beckwourth and Nugget, and came back down. We reached it late in the afternoon, nearly four hours after leaving Nugget.

The lake is notoriously hard to find. The cross-country walking on the way in is pleasant enough, but the last quarter mile down around the water turns steep and is choked with downed timber.

Brown is 4.2 acres at 8,906 feet. FWP has no data for it, which means no stocking record rather than a confirmed empty lake. We fished it and caught nothing.

Tips & safety

• The descent to Silver is the hard part. Getting back down to camp is a grueling drop straight through slippery rock shale and dense timber. In rain that shale is genuinely dangerous. There is no good line to pick. You just work down through the brush carefully until it is over.

• Huckleberries: if you come out of the heavy timber near the bottom of that descent, you land in thick huckleberry patches just above the Silver Lake camp. Worth the stop after a day like that.

• Camping: there is good ground around the shoreline, though the deadfall makes finding a genuinely flat spot a challenge. Getting here with a full pack would be work in itself, so this is better as a day objective from a camp lower down.

• Fishing: FWP lists nothing for Brown. We did not catch anything either.