Kekekabic Lake

Kekekabic Lake sits deep in the Kawishiwi district, roughly 31 miles northeast of Ely, several lakes and portages in from the nearest entry points at Snowbank and Saganaga. It's one of the more remote large lakes in this stretch of the wilderness.

Cliffs and steep rock line much of the shore, dropping straight into water that runs remarkably clear, with visibility reaching past 20 feet in places, unusual for a lake this size in the BWCA. Kekekabic drops to 195 feet at its deepest point, one of the deeper basins in the wilderness, while less than 6 percent of the lake is shallow enough to hold weeds. That combination makes for a lake of open, deep water boxed in by rock rather than shallow bays and marshy edges.

Lake trout are the draw here, holding in that cold, deep basin most of the year. Rock bass are common along the thin band of shallow water at the shoreline, and smallmouth bass have turned up in recent sampling, though not yet in numbers that mark them as established. Yellow perch and white sucker round out the fish community in smaller numbers.

The historic Kekekabic Trail runs along the lake, and that corridor took some of the hardest hits in the 1999 windstorm that flattened swaths of the BWCA between Ely and the Gunflint Trail. Balsam fir, black spruce, and white cedar have filled back in over the two decades since, so the shoreline today mixes younger regrowth with older stands rather than showing open storm damage.

Sixteen campsites are spread around the lake, enough that finding an open one rarely comes down to luck even with its remote position. The lake's size and exposed, cliff-lined shore mean wind matters here: a long crossing builds real chop when it blows, and there's less of the bay-to-bay shelter that a more broken lake offers.

Kekekabic suits paddlers looking for a genuine lake trout lake with cliff-lined scenery and real depth, not a lake you pass through on the way to somewhere else. It's remote enough, and its 16 campsites spread out enough, that most who reach it treat it as a destination rather than a through-lake.