Rest Lake

Rest Lake sits at the top of the Wisconsin DNR grading rubric with an A, a mark reached by the cleanest lakes in Wisconsin. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

A TSI value of 24 puts Rest Lake in the oligotrophic range, where biological productivity stays low and the water column remains clear. The lake's 53 ft maximum depth is in the upper tier for Wisconsin — deep enough for cold-water fish to find refuge in summer. Rest Lake covers 655 acres alongside partial shoreline records — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Rest Lake sits at rank 126 of 202 in Vilas County, in the lower half of the local distribution.

An invasive species record — Banded Mystery Snail — has been logged at Rest Lake; Wisconsin DNR maintains the official infested-waters list. Walleye are documented at Rest Lake, one of 6 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.