Inguadona Lake

Inguadona Lake comes in at a B on the grading rubric — a respectable showing for a Minnesota lake of its size and depth. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

Mesotrophic conditions dominate at Inguadona Lake: enough nutrients for a healthy fishery, not so much that algal blooms become a chronic problem. At 79 ft of maximum depth, Inguadona Lake stratifies reliably through the summer — the hypolimnion stays cooler and clearer than the surface layer suggests. Inguadona Lake covers 1,133 acres alongside 11.0 miles of shoreline, large enough that conditions can vary meaningfully between bays. Within the 133 graded lakes of Cass County, Inguadona Lake sits at rank 101, near the bottom of the county list.

Zebra mussel presence at Inguadona Lake means the lake's clarity numbers carry an asterisk — filtered water is not the same as nutrient-poor water. Muskie are on the species list at Inguadona Lake, alongside the lake's 20 other documented fish. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. Ice-out has been recorded 12 times at Inguadona Lake, with a median around Apr 22. 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.