Lake Shangri-la

Lake Shangri-la earns a C — middle-of-the-pack water quality, with one or two parameters dragging the average down from a stronger grade. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

The lake sits in the mesotrophic zone — the band where most well-managed Wisconsin lakes fall. The lake bottoms out at 24 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. At 74 acres, Lake Shangri-la sits below the Wisconsin median: a small water where shoreline activity has an outsized effect on water quality. Within the 13 graded lakes of Kenosha County, Lake Shangri-la sits at rank 13, near the bottom of the county list.

Zebra mussels have been documented at Lake Shangri-la, which alters the filter-feeding balance and can paradoxically increase water clarity while disrupting the food web. The fishery is bass-led, with 4 documented species across the lake's records. 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.