AT A GLANCE
Why go?
High in the Medicine Bow Mountains, where the Snowy Range Scenic Byway crests at timberline, Brooklyn Lake sits at about 10,500 feet as a quiet subalpine sheet of water cupped in the shadow of snow-streaked Browns Peak. It is a place built for unhurried mountain time: a hand-powered paddle at dawn, a cast for trout from the shore, and an evening in a campground where nearly every site looks out across the lake toward the peak.
Far from the crowds of the Front Range, Brooklyn Lake is easy to reach yet genuinely remote-feeling. A short gravel spur off Highway 130 delivers you to a small US Forest Service campground and a busy trailhead that launches hikers into some of the loveliest lake country in southeastern Wyoming. Summer and early fall are the working seasons; outside that window, the snow that gives the range its name takes the road back.
A lake in the shadow of Browns Peak
Brooklyn Lake is one of the higher gems of the Snowy Range, the forested, glacially carved wall of the Medicine Bow Mountains about thirty miles west of Laramie and twenty miles east of Saratoga. The lake lies in a subalpine basin at roughly 10,500 feet, with the broad, often snow-dusted bulk of Browns Peak rising directly behind it. Around the shoreline, stunted wind-shaped spruce and meadows thick with summer wildflowers mark the transition into true alpine country, where elk, moose and marmots move through the higher basins.
