Hanson Lake

Hanson Lake sits at the top of the Minnesota PCA grading rubric with an A, a mark reached by the cleanest lakes in Minnesota. 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. At 100 ft of maximum depth, Hanson Lake stratifies reliably through the summer — the hypolimnion stays cooler and clearer than the surface layer suggests. Hanson Lake covers 289 acres alongside 5.6 miles of shoreline — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Within Lake County's 142 graded waters, Hanson Lake sits at rank 7, near the top of the local distribution.

Hanson Lake has no invasive species recorded in Minnesota state databases as of 2023, though prevention practices still apply at all access points. The fishery is bass-led, with 6 documented species across the lake's records. No formal public access is documented at Hanson Lake — most use is by shoreline residents and their guests. 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.