Pine Lake

Pine Lake earns an A — water clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate among the best monitored waters in Crow Wing County. The three sub-grades — clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a — track close together, so no single parameter is dragging the average.

The lake sits in the mesotrophic zone — the band where most well-managed Minnesota lakes fall. The lake bottoms out at 17 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. At 324 acres, Pine Lake fits the Minnesota median for monitored lakes, with 3.7 miles of shoreline. Pine Lake sits at rank 64 of 120 in Crow Wing County, in the lower half of the local distribution.

Zebra mussel presence at Pine Lake means the lake's clarity numbers carry an asterisk — filtered water is not the same as nutrient-poor water. Walleye are documented at Pine Lake, one of 14 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.