Upper Mission Lake

On the LakeGrade scale Upper Mission Lake grades a B, with clarity at 10.0 ft and 21 µg/L of phosphorus placing it above the Minnesota median. Clarity, phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a all rate similarly, so there is no obvious single lever to pull on watershed management.

Mesotrophic conditions dominate at Upper Mission Lake: enough nutrients for a healthy fishery, not so much that algal blooms become a chronic problem. The lake bottoms out at 36 ft — a moderate depth that supports a warm-water fishery without the year-round cold refuge a deeper basin provides. Upper Mission Lake covers 882 acres alongside 6.0 miles of shoreline — a mid-sized water that supports a working fishery without being so large that conditions diverge between basins. Upper Mission Lake sits at rank 79 of 120 in Crow Wing County, in the lower half of the local distribution.

Eurasian watermilfoil has been documented at Upper Mission Lake, requiring shoreline management to keep dense mats from crowding native vegetation. Walleye are documented at Upper Mission Lake, one of 13 fish species on record for the lake. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. The lake has a long ice-out record — 41 observations on file, with a median ice-out around Apr 18. 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.