Little Cut Foot Lake

Little Cut Foot Lake pulls a D on the LakeGrade rubric — phosphorus loading and limited clarity hold it below the Minnesota average. 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.

At a TSI of 53, Little Cut Foot Lake reads as eutrophic — nutrient-rich enough that summer algal growth and reduced clarity are expected, not unusual. The lake bottoms out at 20 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. The lake's 619 acres and 12.4 miles of shoreline put it in the mid-range bucket — large enough for varied use, small enough that watershed inputs reach the whole basin. Little Cut Foot Lake ranks 136 of 141 in Itasca County — at the lower end of the locally monitored distribution.

Zebra mussel presence at Little Cut Foot Lake means the lake's clarity numbers carry an asterisk — filtered water is not the same as nutrient-poor water. Walleye are documented at Little Cut Foot Lake, one of 15 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA 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.