Pine Lake

Pine Lake sits at the top of the Wisconsin DNR grading rubric with an A, a mark reached by the cleanest lakes in Wisconsin. The three sub-grades — clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a — track close together, so no single parameter is dragging the average.

The lake's low TSI puts it in oligotrophic territory — the cleanest of the four trophic classes, but also the most vulnerable to nutrient-driven shifts. A maximum depth of 41 ft puts Pine Lake in the middle of Wisconsin's depth distribution. Pine Lake covers 300 acres alongside partial shoreline records — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Within Iron County's 34 graded waters, Pine Lake sits at rank 4, near the top of the local distribution.

An invasive species record — Purple Loosestrife — has been logged at Pine Lake; Wisconsin DNR maintains the official infested-waters list. Walleye are documented at Pine 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.