Wrong Lake
Drainage: Stillwater
Approaches: Goose Lake Jeep Trail — 5 mi, all off-trail; 1,300 ft up · From Courthouse Lake — about 1 mi, dropping 1,000 ft off the canyon rim
Elevation: 9,007 feet
Fish: Yellowstone cutthroat (FWP)
Coordinates: 45.13749, -109.96277
Bugs: Minimal on our visit
Getting there
Getting to the start is half the trip. The Goose Lake Jeep Trail needs an ATV, an off-road buggy or a genuinely capable off-road vehicle. Nothing standard will make it.
Your driving ends at the turnaround near the Goose Creek waterfall, where you park and shoulder packs. Just before the trail ends near the falls, look for a hard right that points you north. That is where the walking starts.
Park with the marten in mind. They are active in this basin and they chew wires and cables underneath parked machines. That is a risk to your ride home.
From the turnaround it is five miles to Wrong, all off trail, with 1,300 feet of climbing.
The hike
You can see Wrong Lake from the canyon rim near Courthouse, and for most people that should be the end of it.
Reaching the water means dropping a thousand vertical feet off that rim and climbing the same thousand back out. The route down is steep, rocky, thick with stinging nettles, and guarded by cliffs. There is no easy line and finding a safe one is the entire problem. It took us about two hours from Courthouse, which is a mile away.
It wore us out completely. We did it because looking at a lake from above is not the same as being at it, and if you are counting lakes you have to touch the water. That is the only honest reason to make this descent. If you are not counting, the view from the rim is the better trade.
Wrong is 9,007 feet, the lowest water in this whole basin by several hundred feet, which is exactly why it sits so far below everything around it. FWP lists Yellowstone cutthroat.
Tips & safety
This is the hardest lake in the basin and it is not close. Everything else up here is route finding across open ground. This is a thousand feet of cliffs and loose rock, twice.
Expert route finding required. The cliffs mean there are lines that dead-end. Pick your descent carefully and remember it, because you are coming back up the same ground.
Nettles: long sleeves and long pants. The descent is thick with them.
Weather: high country with nothing to break a front, and you do not want to be on that descent in rain.
Fishing: FWP lists Yellowstone cutthroat.
Camping: Wrong sits at 9,007 feet in the canyon bottom, below the open benches, so there is more shelter here than anywhere else in the basin. The catch is that everything you carry down, you carry back up a thousand feet. Nobody should camp here by plan, only by circumstance.
