White Bear Lake

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

Mesotrophic conditions dominate at White Bear Lake: enough nutrients for a healthy fishery, not so much that algal blooms become a chronic problem. White Bear Lake is unusually deep for Minnesota at 83 ft, which buffers the lake against summer warming and helps the deep water stay oxygenated. White Bear Lake covers 2,428 acres alongside 13.6 miles of shoreline, large enough that conditions can vary meaningfully between bays. Among the 31 graded lakes in Washington County, White Bear Lake ranks 2 — in the top quartile locally.

Zebra mussel presence at White Bear Lake means the lake's clarity numbers carry an asterisk — filtered water is not the same as nutrient-poor water. Muskie are on the species list at White Bear Lake, alongside the lake's 18 other documented fish. Public access is available — the lake is on the Minnesota PCA public-access list. The lake has a long ice-out record — 172 observations on file, with a median ice-out around Apr 12. 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.