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We went up elk hunting on the South Slope and were lucky enough to bag a bull before they all headed to the reservation. As soon as first light hits on the opening day Several herds run the 3 miles to the tribal land and hop the fence. They know from experience that they are safe once over the fence. This is my brother with his 4×4 bull. Kind of hard to see in this pic, but he still had a lot of his velvet on his antlers.
After quartering him and hiking him out for 2 miles we were pretty much spent. So the next day we decided to do some fishing. The first stop was Chepeta Lake.
We decided we would do the loop around Chepeta Lake which then goes past Moccasin Lake, Papoose Lake, Wigwam Lake and finally up to Walk Up Lake. We started the hike around 6 am so we could try and get a good start on any left over elk. We didn’t see many elk tracks but there were a ton of coyote tracks, and what looked like wolf tracks as well. The trail is pretty close to Chepeta Lake so from time to time you can still see the lake.
Moccasin Lake was extremely low and more like a collection of frozen puddles then a lake. It was still dark so i didn’t get any pics of Moccasin Lake. As we continued on there is a fork in the trail between Wigwam and Papoose. We decided to go to Wigwam since its a little bigger. Below you can see the little creek coming out of Wigwam Lake going into Chepeta Lake.
below is a pic of Wigwam Lake. As you can see there wasn’t much water in it either.
So we continued on towards Walk Up Lake. The trail up to this point is for the most part pretty flat and really easy to hike. After this it got a lot harder. We had to use the GPS to figure out which way to go. As we hiked around the northern end of Chepeta Lake we realized how big this lake actually is. From the dam where you park the lake doesn’t look that big. This lake is actually gigantic.
Once you hit this area you are walking on small loose boulders and rocks. This is where the hike gets incredibly annoying. After Looking at a giant mountain and realizing we had to climb it to get to Walk Up Lake we decided to traverse down and fish instead of continuing on. As you can see from the pic below where the Arrow is at. Walk UP Lake is still a good mile past that point.
We caught a Brook Trout right off the bat and thought fishing would be hot. That was the only fish we caught at Chepeta Lake, although it was a pretty one at 14″. We also found out why most of the trails are on the east side of the lake. The entire west shore of Chepeta Lake is a boulder field.
Walking back to the dam area to the truck is a major pain. There is several streams and loose rocks on the west shore. I’ve heard there is also good fishing coming out of the white rocks river below, but we didn’t stop. Below is a pic of the White Rocks River.
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