Shamineau Lake

Shamineau Lake sits at the top of the Minnesota PCA grading rubric with an A, a mark reached by the cleanest lakes in Minnesota. With clarity and phosphorus scored, the sub-grades cluster within a letter of each other, pointing to stable conditions rather than one specific stressor.

The lake sits in the mesotrophic zone — the band where most well-managed Minnesota lakes fall. Shamineau Lake is unusually deep for Minnesota at 52 ft, which buffers the lake against summer warming and helps the deep water stay oxygenated. At 1,434 acres, Shamineau Lake is one of the larger lakes in Morrison County, with 10.3 miles of shoreline supporting multiple distinct use patterns. Shamineau Lake ranks 5 of 16 in Morrison County — solidly in the upper half of the local distribution.

Shamineau Lake carries an invasive watermilfoil record — boat-launch decontamination and shoreline care matter more here than at uninfested lakes. Muskie are on the species list at Shamineau Lake, among the lake's 18 documented fish. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. Ice-out has been logged at Shamineau Lake more than two dozen times, putting the median around Apr 20 — a useful baseline for tracking climate trends. 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.