Crescent Lake

Crescent Lake covers about 755 acres in Cook County, near Grand Marais. It carries the Tofte ranger district designation, but the lake itself sits outside the wilderness boundary: the nearest BWCA entry points are several miles off as the crow flies, none of them connected to it by portage, so this is a lake you drive to rather than paddle into from the interior.

The shoreline runs to about 14 miles, folded enough to more than double the straight-line size of the lake, and it stays shallow through most of that reach. It drops to 28 feet at its deepest point, but nearly three quarters of the basin is shallow enough to hold weeds, so open, deep water is the exception here rather than the rule.

Walleye are the lake's main draw, though they run small and grow slowly rather than filling stringers with trophies. Muskellunge hold a naturally reproducing population of the Shoepack strain, a native fish rather than a stocked one, and they fall under a 30-inch minimum size instead of the standard muskie slot since few of them grow past that mark. Smallmouth bass have taken hold since the late 1990s, and yellow perch are thick enough to keep everything else fed, even if most run too small to bother cleaning.

A concrete boat launch and a U.S. Forest Service campground sit on the lake's northwest shore, off Forest Road 165. There's no wilderness quota campsite system here and no permit to arrange, just a ramp, a campground, and open water to fish.

Crescent Lake suits a car-camping trip or a day of muskie and walleye fishing near Grand Marais more than a wilderness stay. It sits close enough to several BWCA entry points to work as a staging stop before a trip, but the campground and boat ramp put it in a different category from the portage-only lakes just a few miles in.