Long Island Lake

Long Island Lake is an 883-acre lake in the Gunflint district, sitting at the center of several routes rather than on the direct line from any single one. Cross Bay, Brant, and Brule Lakes all reach it from different directions, which makes it a common midpoint on multi-day loops through this part of the wilderness rather than a lake most people pass through quickly.

The lake runs deep, dropping to 85 feet in its main basin while only about a third of it stays shallow enough to fish from the surface down. The water has stayed clear for decades, clear enough to watch the bottom drop away well out from shore, about the same as it was forty years ago. More than 23 miles of shoreline wrap that acreage into bays and narrows, and one short portage even cuts across a neck of land connecting two arms of the lake to each other rather than leading to a different lake at all.

Lake trout are the lake's defining fish, and their numbers have grown here over the decades, with some fish reaching good size. Northern pike are scarce by comparison and don't reproduce heavily in the lake, but the ones anglers do catch tend to run large. Burbot show up in good numbers too, though mostly too small to interest anglers.

Fourteen campsites are spread around the lake, none of them closed, with enough shoreline to keep them from crowding even with several routes converging here.

Long Island Lake suits paddlers looking for real lake trout water without needing one of the well-known border trout lakes to find it, reached instead by way of several different entry corridors rather than a straight line from any single landing.