CourtHouse Lake

Up in the Northwest corner of the Stillwater drainage lies these lakes. This is a good intermediate overnight backpacking trip. This hike requires going up goose creek road, where you need an ATV or off road buggy. Be cautions because pine martins love chewing on cables, it would not be fun to get to a ATV that won’t run. Just before where the road ends there is a hard right that brings you north. This is where your hiking will start. 

These Lakes Include: Wall, Panhandle, Star Dust, Anvil, Beauty, Lake Aries, Sourdough, Spider, Fly, Courthouse, and if you are feeling strong there is Wrong lake. There is a trail to Wall but there is no tail past Wall Lake. Now on our trip unfortunately we only saw 1 hour of sunlight for 3 days, we were wet but it made it that much more enjoyable.

Day 1 base camp at Anvil. 2.3 miles 400 vertical, pretty easy day. There is nice walking all the way to Anvil Lake. Anvil has plenty of fishing and camping locations. 

Day 2: 2 miles and about 1k vertical to Courthouse Lake. It was fairly steep right off the bat, after the first initial hill to get to Lake Aries the walking got much easier. So I have said this in another post but I will continue to say it, we can not say we have been to a lake unless we can physically touch it. So this brings us to the point of Wrong Lake and this lake is named properly. this lake can be viewed from the top of the canyon and it is 1 mile and 1k vertical down than back up. This is not an easy hike, it is very steep, rocky, filled with stinging needles and cliffs. Props to you if you decide to do it because making it to this lake wore us out. We than took a nice break near Courthouse(in the rain) and had to finish our route back to basecamp. Next day we headed out back to the ATV’s and had a nice hamburger in Cooke City before we returned home. 

This is an excellent and fairly easy hike. There are some good climbs you can’t avoid but they don’t last very long. The only trick to this place is you need an ATV to get to the trailhead.