Cave Lake

Steptoe Creek Road leaves U.S. 6, 50 and 93 southeast of Ely and runs north up the creek into Cave Lake State Park, where it meets Success Summit Road. The lake lies in the Schell Creek Range. State parks and county tourism put it 14 miles from Ely, and the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s angler guide says 15. Cave Creek feeds the lake from above, and Steptoe Creek carries its outflow away below the dam. The reservoir covers 32 surface acres and holds 538 acre-feet when full. The wildlife department owns the water rights to Cave Creek and keeps the lake at capacity all year.

The country around it is limestone and shale, raised in large up-thrusts and cut by narrow canyons and shallow caves. Photographs of the park show a rock wall pierced by a window. Pinyon and juniper woodland, broken by wetlands, surrounds the water, with aspen, big sagebrush, rabbitbrush, Mormon tea, wild rose, chokecherry and currant. Elk and mule deer range here, along with bobcat, mountain lion and coyote. Hawks, eagles, vultures, pinyon jays and magpies are common, and there is the occasional western rattlesnake. In May 2026 the park posted a camper’s photograph of a black-crowned night heron.

Two campgrounds and a flat-wake lake

German brown trout live in the lake and in the park’s streams, and hatchery rainbow trout are stocked. Fishing is allowed 24 hours a day, from shore or from a boat, with a limit of five trout. Motorboats may use the lake at a flat wake, no faster than 5 miles an hour. The wildlife department’s guide puts the best fishing in June and again in September and October. It recommends stripped woolly buggers, leech patterns and bead-head nymphs, or nightcrawlers and PowerBait.

Two picnic areas sit along the shore with tables, grills and water. Lake View Campground, near the water, stays open the year round, though its facilities may close in extreme cold. Elk Flat Campground is the first camp a visitor sees coming in from the highways. It opens in early May and closes in mid-October, weather permitting. Every site in both campgrounds is level, with a fire pit and grill, a table and parking, reached by unpaved roads. In August 2026, after wildfires in the area, the park banned wood, charcoal and any fire that leaves ash, even in those pits, and told campers to bring propane stoves. The state’s list of parks under fire restrictions, updated October 1, 2026, no longer named Cave Lake.

Park staff post their programs at kiosks. On May 2, 2026, a ranger led a hike on the Steptoe Creek Trail. On June 13, a free fishing day, wildlife department staff handed out fishing gear to children at the lake. In August the park posted pictures of its night sky with the line “We sure love our night sky!” and told visitors to watch for the Perseid meteor showers.

Four trails and two feet of ice

Motor vehicles are barred from the four maintained trails. The Steptoe Creek Trail, an easy three-mile round trip, starts at the lower parking lot, crosses the creek, and returns by Success Summit Road. The Cave Springs Trail leaves the same lot for five moderately strenuous miles through the hills. The Cave Lake Overlook Trail is a strenuous 4.5-mile loop from the east end of the lake. The Twisted Pines Trail, the newest, runs a little more than four miles one way from below Elk Flat Campground to join the Overlook loop.

Snow is common from early December through early April, with several feet on the ground in the deepest months. Winter highs run in the 30s and 40s, nights often fall below zero, and extreme lows reach thirty below. The lake ice may grow 24 inches thick. Ice fishing generally begins in late November or early December and can last into March, and the catch rate is very good. Skaters use the boat launch. Snowmobiles run on approved dirt roads inside the park and unload on Success Summit Road to reach the National Forest lands beyond. Sledding and snowshoeing are also popular. Most park roads are paved and kept clear, though plowing may lag a day or two behind a storm.

A ranch reservoir sold for ten dollars

An account in the Elko Daily Free Press in 2014 says the Shoshone were the first people here. They lived on pine nuts, roots, berries and game, and they made sandals, skirts and twined baskets from sagebrush. The same account says the fur trapper Jedediah Strong Smith, crossing the Schell Creek Range in 1827, was the first pioneer to meet them.

The Isbell Construction Company built the reservoir in 1939 to store water for the CCC Ranch, west in Steptoe Valley. In 1949 Joseph and Antone Laxague of Ely bought the ranch and the lake. They sold both in 1956 to the C.B. Land and Cattle Company, and in 1961 the dam was enlarged to 364 feet long and 60 feet high. In 1968 the owners of the C.B. Ranch sold all 1,240 acres for $10.00 to the Nevada Department of Fish and Game, now the Department of Wildlife.

The Legislature transferred the land to the Division of State Parks in 1973. In 1977 the division built a campground, a 40-foot boat dock and day-use areas beside the lake, and Elk Flat followed in 1988. An expansion to 4,560 acres, with land from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was endorsed in 2005 and finalized in 2015.

Draining and refilling the lake

In 2018 the State Engineer’s office notified the wildlife department of deficiencies in the dam. The park closed to water-based recreation in 2019, the year the department dates the start of the project. A 2022 assessment listed the dam in poor condition. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported it among the 162 Nevada dams the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rates as high-hazard. Before the drawdown, the park averaged more than 63,000 visitors a year.

Draining began in October 2021, and the lake reached minimum pool in January 2022. The accounts of when construction started differ. The department told KTVN that construction began in May 2023, but its 2025 presentation to the Legislature says restoration officially began in 2024. The work expanded the spillway, increased stormwater capacity and improved the low-level buttress, and it left the lake at its historic elevation. In September 2024 about 200 artificial habitat structures were installed across the lakebed at various depths, built to shelter fish through several stages of life. The campgrounds and trails stayed open throughout.

Reconstruction was finished in the fall of 2024, and the dam began impounding water in late November. Heath Korell, the department’s fisheries biologist in Ely, estimated the refill could take up to nine months. By March 25, 2025, the reservoir was full and already spilling into the new spillway. Officials warned that plants grown on the dry lakebed would leave debris in the water.

The Rediscover Cave Lake celebration ran from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on June 7, 2025. A fish truck arrived between 8:30 and 9 with about 2,000 pounds of catchable rainbow trout. The wildlife department held a float-tube fly-fishing clinic, and a rubber duck race split its proceeds between the lake and the winner. Las Vegas Brewing Company debuted a “Dam Good Beer.” The ribbon was cut at 1 p.m. “Restoring Cave Lake has been a collaborative effort, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see the lake full again,” said Alan Jenne, the wildlife department’s director.

The department planned to stock 17,000 rainbow trout in the spring of 2025 and 10,000 in the fall. It would also like to bring in smallmouth bass, once the lake’s crayfish prove a reliable food source. The drawdown sharply reduced the brown trout in the lake. The adfluvial browns persisted in the stream, and the department expects they will likely reestablish themselves in the full lake.