After wildfires burn lake watersheds, combusted or intact organic and inorganic materials remaining on the landscape are susceptible to erosion by wind, water, and gravity. Delivery of these materials to mountain lakes has the potential to, albeit somewhat temporarily, reduce water clarity due to higher concentrations of light absorbing molecules (i.e., colored dissolved organic carbon) or suspended inorganic (e.g., ash) or organic particles, potentially including phytoplankton. To test for these responses, we used the LAGOS-US LANDSAT product, which provides 37 years (1984–2020) of remotely sensed predictions of Secchi depth (SD), turbidity (NTU), true color (COLOR), and concentrations of total suspended solids (TSS), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and chlorophyll-a (CHL) for 6,992 mountain lakes in the western United States derived from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 imagery. We identified 991 mountain lakes that had burned during the LANDSAT period (i.e., after 1984) based on spatial overlap between wildfire perimeters and watershed boundaries and selected an equal number of reference lakes with no recorded fire in their watersheds since 1984. Using a before–after–control–impact framework, we estimated log response ratios using a Bayesian hierarchical model. SD increased, despite an increase in TSS, explainable by a decline in NTU, DOC, CHL, with no change in COLOR. However, these responses occurred in both burned and reference lakes, indicating that these patterns were not specifically attributable to wildfires.