Rice Lake

Rice Lake carries a solid B grade — strong on most parameters, with measurements that hold up well across the summer season. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

Eutrophic conditions are the baseline here: clarity drops noticeably in late summer, and dissolved oxygen near the bottom can become a concern. A maximum depth of just 7 ft means sediment-bound phosphorus releases back into the water column whenever wind stirs the bottom — a classic shallow-lake dynamic. Rice Lake is small — 79 acres alongside partial shoreline records — which makes it sensitive to even modest changes in watershed runoff or recreational pressure. Rice Lake ranks 187 of 202 in Vilas County — at the lower end of the locally monitored distribution.

Rice Lake has no invasive species recorded in Wisconsin state databases as of 2025, though prevention practices still apply at all access points. Walleye are documented at Rice 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.