Shagawa Lake

Shagawa Lake covers about 2,345 acres in St. Louis County, its shore running right up against the town of Ely. It falls inside the Kawishiwi district, but the lake itself sits outside the wilderness boundary rather than in it: none of the nearby entry points reach it by portage, so this is a lake you drive to and launch a boat on, not one you paddle into from the interior.

The shoreline runs craggy rather than smooth, broken into bays and dotted with small islands. It drops to 48 feet at its deepest point, but only about 30 percent of the lake is shallow enough to hold weeds, so most of the basin is open water with the shallows concentrated around the bays and islands. Boulder makes up most of the bottom near shore, with patches of gravel and sand mixed in.

Walleye carry the fishery here, backed by a perch population thick enough to keep them well fed, and the state stocks walleye fry every third year to hold the population up. Northern pike run to real size, some topping 34 inches, and smallmouth bass work the rocky structure along shore. Muskellunge turn up occasionally, most likely strays from nearby waters, but they aren't an established population worth planning a trip around.

Motors are allowed here, and there's no wilderness campsite system to speak of: no campsites are mapped on Shagawa, and the shore instead carries five public boat launches along with resort cabins and private homes backing up to the water. Most people fishing it are staying in Ely rather than camping on the lake itself.

The lake also carries a scientific footnote. Decades of Ely's municipal sewage flowing into it built up phosphorus levels and fed heavy algae growth, and in 1973 the city built one of the country's first advanced treatment plants to strip most of that phosphorus out before discharge. The lake never recovered as fully as expected, since phosphorus banked in the lake-bottom sediment keeps feeding it from within, and the algae blooms that show up most summers by late season trace straight back to that history. Water clarity runs around 9.5 feet through most of the season before those blooms move in.

Shagawa suits a day of walleye fishing out of Ely more than a stay in the wilderness. It's a developed, motorized lake right at the boundary, without the portages or quota campsites that define the lakes beyond it.