Twentysix Lake

Twentysix 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.

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. The lake bottoms out at 45 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. Twentysix Lake covers 218 acres alongside partial shoreline records — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Twentysix Lake ranks 24 of 70 in Burnett County — solidly in the upper half of the local distribution.

An invasive species record — Chinese Mystery Snail — has been logged at Twentysix Lake; Wisconsin DNR maintains the official infested-waters list. Bass fishing is part of the appeal: the species list runs to 4, anchored by largemouth and/or smallmouth bass. 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.