Pike Lake

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

Mesotrophic conditions dominate at Pike Lake: enough nutrients for a healthy fishery, not so much that algal blooms become a chronic problem. A maximum depth of 17 ft puts Pike Lake in the middle of Wisconsin's depth distribution. The lake's 741 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. Within the 26 graded lakes of Price County, Pike Lake sits at rank 22, near the bottom of the county list.

An invasive species record — Chinese Mystery Snail — has been logged at Pike Lake; Wisconsin DNR maintains the official infested-waters list. Walleye are documented at Pike Lake, one of 5 fish species on record for the lake. 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.