Little Goose Lake
Drainage: Stillwater
Approaches: Goose Lake Road end (FS 3230), approximately 3 mi round trip; ~100 ft up. On trail the whole way · From Goose Lake, approximately 1 mi up Goose Creek
Elevation: 9,984 feet
Fish: Yellowstone cutthroat (FWP)
Coordinates: 45.12609, -109.90624
Bugs: Minimal on our visit
Getting there
Same road as Goose. Forest Service 3230 leaves US 212 about three miles east of Cooke City, just short of Colter Pass, and runs approximately eight miles to the end of the road at the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness boundary. The first two miles are passable in a normal car. After that it takes high clearance and four-wheel drive, or an ATV.
From the end of the road it is about a mile and a half to Little Goose, all on trail, with roughly a hundred feet of climbing. If you are already at Goose, it is about a mile up Goose Creek to the northeast.
The hike
The road is the hard part of this trip, same as it is for Goose. Once you are parked at the boundary the walking is easy, with only around a hundred feet of gain across the whole distance.
Little Goose sits northeast of Goose Lake and roughly forty feet higher. About eight acres, above the trees, in open country. It runs approximately nine feet deep on average and around twenty-three at the deepest.
Tips & safety
Navigation: on trail the whole way from the road end. From Goose, follow Goose Creek up to the northeast.
Camping: FWP notes some flat spots at the lake and scarce firewood. We have not scouted sites here ourselves, so treat that as terrain description rather than a site report. The lake sits above the trees, and most people in this basin camp lower, back along the road or down at Goose.
Fishing: Yellowstone cutthroat (FWP), abundant and self-sustaining. FWP has no planting records for Little Goose at all, and thinks the fish likely arrived from the Clarks Fork on their own. Reproduction is healthy. The 2017 survey angled eleven fish in an hour and a half, averaging about nine inches, and the crew noted the cutthroat were pickier than usual. A 2000 survey found fish averaging about eleven inches.
Old mining country: the whole Goose Creek and Cooke City area is scattered with abandoned cabins, mine camps and rusted equipment. Some of it is a century old and none of it is maintained. Timbers rot, shafts open up, and there is sharp metal in the grass. Look all you want, don't go inside anything, and keep kids close.
Bugs: minimal on our visit.
Little Legs: we walked this one with our own young kids and they finished it on their own feet. That is a record of one day with our kids, not a rating. Read what Little Legs means.
