Skeeter Lake

Drainage: Clarks Fork (MT)
Approaches: From Spaghetti Lake, approximately 0.3 mi north; roughly 300 ft up · Clay Butte Trailhead, approximately 8 mi with 1 mi off-trail; roughly 800 ft up and 900 down · Crazy Lakes Trailhead, approximately 6 mi with 3 mi off-trail; roughly 1,200 ft up
Elevation: 9,276 feet
Fish: Arctic grayling (FWP)
Coordinates: 45.00804, -109.68433
Bugs: Mosquitoes present on our visit

Getting there

Skeeter sits west of Granite Lake and straight north of Spaghetti. We were basecamped at Granite for two nights, which made this a day-pack afternoon.

From Spaghetti it is about three tenths of a mile north with roughly three hundred feet of climbing. If you have already made the thousand-foot haul up to Spaghetti, Skeeter costs almost nothing extra.

The hike

Head straight north out of the Spaghetti basin. Short and steep, and you are there.

Around ten and a half acres at 9,276 feet, and shallow. It averages about four feet deep and only reaches twenty-five at the deepest point. Lily pads cover somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of the surface and the bottom is heavily silted.

Tips & safety

• Navigation: straight north from Spaghetti. Coming from Crazy Lakes, plan on three miles off-trail.

• Camping: FWP records campsites and firewood here, and then adds that the lake is aptly named. Take that for what it is worth.

• Fishing: Arctic grayling on paper, but read the record before you carry a rod up here. FWP stocked 1,100 fish in 2008 and 500 more in 2015, and their last three surveys have caught nothing at all. There is no inlet and no outlet, so nothing can spawn. The bottom is silted and most of the surface is lily pads. Future plants have been put on hold.

• Bugs: mosquitoes were out. The lake did not get that name for nothing.