Little Crooked Lake

Little Crooked Lake sits at the top of the Wisconsin DNR grading rubric with an A, a mark reached by the cleanest lakes in Wisconsin. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

A TSI value of 37 puts Little Crooked Lake in the oligotrophic range, where biological productivity stays low and the water column remains clear. The lake bottoms out at 30 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. The lake's 154 acres and partial shoreline records put it in the mid-range bucket — large enough for varied use, small enough that watershed inputs reach the whole basin. Little Crooked Lake ranks 26 of 202 in Vilas County, putting it in the upper tier of locally monitored lakes.

An invasive species record — Rusty Crayfish — has been logged at Little Crooked Lake; Wisconsin DNR maintains the official infested-waters list. The fishery includes walleye alongside the lake's other 5 documented species — a notable draw for Wisconsin anglers. Public access is available — the lake is on the Wisconsin DNR public-access list. 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.