Butte Lake Trail

Butte Lake Trail is an unmaintained ORV route from the Denali Highway near mile 94 to Butte Lake. The mapped line is 3.25 miles each way, about 6.5 miles round trip. A printed road guide gives five miles to the lake, and an older inventory lists two nearby starts, so treat 6.5 as a mapped estimate rather than a settled distance. Check the access and route on a topographic map before leaving the highway.

This is not a built or signed hiking path. Most trails along the highway are unmarked, and wet spots can call for rubber boots. One visitor account describes Butte Lake as marshy in wet years. The elevation profile gains about 70 meters from the road to the lake, with roughly 90 meters of total climbing; the bigger question is how soft the ground is when you go. Allow about four hours, with extra time if the route is wet or hard to follow.

The route reaches the lake shore, where lake trout and Arctic grayling are found. A road guide recommends June through September for fishing. Treat the lake as your turnaround and retrace the same corridor; the mapped route does not show a loop or a trail continuing around the shore.

Start from the south side of the Denali Highway near mile 94. A short, well-used road to the trailhead is reported, but no sign or formal lot is confirmed. A separate primitive parking and camping area above a pond near mile 94.5 is not verified as the same access. The highway is generally open from mid-May to around October 1; confirm current road and pedestrian access before setting out.

Near mile 94, road construction in 1957 cut into a partly collapsed palsa and hastened its deterioration. A palsa is a low mound of peat and ground ice. Several nearby kettle lakes formed when chunks of glacial ice were buried in debris and later melted.