Echo Lake

Echo Lake covers about 1,142 acres in St. Louis County, its shore reached by county road near the small community of Buyck. It carries a La Croix district designation, but the lake sits outside the wilderness boundary: the nearest entry points, Lac La Croix and Little Vermilion Lake, sit 8.5 and 9 straight-line miles away with no portage connecting to either. This is a lake you drive to and launch a boat on, not one a wilderness route reaches.

The basin runs shallow throughout, topping out around 10 feet deep, with roughly 92 percent of the lake shallow enough to count as littoral zone. The water runs dark and tea-stained rather than clear, over a bottom of mostly muck with boulder and sand mixed in near shore, and lily pads and other emergent plants fill many of the bays.

Walleye, northern pike, and black crappie make up the core of the fishery, with walleye running above the numbers typical for a lake this size and crappie producing strong catches in recent surveys, though counts swing year to year. Smallmouth and largemouth bass, bluegill, and yellow perch round out the rest of the catch.

Motors run without restriction here, and there's no wilderness campsite system on Echo Lake. The DNR also runs it as one of the state's Sentinel Lakes, a small group of lakes tracked closely over time to see how climate, development, and invasive species change a lake like this one.

Echo Lake suits a day of walleye and crappie fishing out of Buyck rather than a wilderness trip. It's a shallow, motorized lake well outside the BWCA, without the portages or quota campsites of the lakes to its east.