Pelican Lake

Pelican Lake earns a C — middle-of-the-pack water quality, with one or two parameters dragging the average down from a stronger grade.

The lake sits in the mesotrophic zone — the band where most well-managed Minnesota lakes fall. The lake bottoms out at 38 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. With 11,546 acres of surface and 55.7 miles of shoreline, Pelican Lake is a large water by Minnesota standards — recreational pressure is spread across a long shoreline. Among the 187 graded lakes in St. Louis County, Pelican Lake sits at rank 91, above the county median.

Pelican Lake has no invasive species recorded in Minnesota state databases as of 2024, though prevention practices still apply at all access points. Walleye are documented at Pelican Lake, one of 11 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 Pelican Lake more than two dozen times, putting the median around Apr 26 — 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.