Cedar Lake

Cedar Lake earns an A — water clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate among the best monitored waters in Morrison County. Sub-grades cluster within a single letter of each other, which usually means the lake is in stable trophic balance rather than fighting one specific stressor.

The lake's low TSI puts it in oligotrophic territory — the cleanest of the four trophic classes, but also the most vulnerable to nutrient-driven shifts. The lake's 88 ft maximum depth is in the upper tier for Minnesota — deep enough for cold-water fish to find refuge in summer. Cedar Lake covers 236 acres alongside 3.4 miles of shoreline — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Among the 16 graded lakes in Morrison County, Cedar Lake ranks 1 — in the top quartile locally.

Cedar Lake is on the Minnesota infested-waters list for zebra mussels — boaters should follow clean-drain-dry protocols when moving gear to or from the lake. Walleye are documented at Cedar Lake, one of 14 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. Ice-out has been logged at Cedar Lake more than two dozen times, putting the median around Apr 15 — a useful baseline for tracking climate trends. Monitoring depth is thin here: the LakeGrade rubric is applied to a small number of sample years, and the grade will be revised as more data accumulates.