Minnewaska Lake

On the LakeGrade scale Minnewaska Lake grades a B, with clarity at 11.2 ft and 24 µg/L of phosphorus placing it above the Minnesota median. The three sub-grades — clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a — track close together, so no single parameter is dragging the average.

A TSI near 46 places Minnewaska Lake in the mesotrophic band — moderate productivity, with seasonal swings between clearer spring water and richer late-summer conditions. The lake bottoms out at 32 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. Minnewaska Lake covers 8,050 acres alongside 19.9 miles of shoreline, large enough that conditions can vary meaningfully between bays. Within Pope County's 25 graded waters, Minnewaska Lake sits at rank 3, near the top of the local distribution.

Zebra mussel presence at Minnewaska Lake means the lake's clarity numbers carry an asterisk — filtered water is not the same as nutrient-poor water. Walleye are documented at Minnewaska Lake, one of 21 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. Ice-out has been logged at Minnewaska Lake more than two dozen times, putting the median around Apr 15 — a useful baseline for tracking climate trends. 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.