Snowbank Lake

Snowbank Lake sits right at the edge of the wilderness in the Kawishiwi district, close enough to Ely that it's an entry point in its own right rather than water you have to paddle days to reach. Routes head south from here through a string of small connected lakes toward Disappointment Lake and the country beyond, but Snowbank itself is broad, open water rather than a tight interior lake.

It runs deep for its size, dropping to 150 feet, while less than a fifth of the lake is shallow enough to fish from the surface down. The water is unusually clear for a lake this size, clear enough to see well down along the rubble and boulder bottom that lines most of the shore. That depth and clarity put Snowbank among the higher, colder lakes in this stretch of the BWCA.

Lake trout are what Snowbank is best known for, including some of the largest ever taken from these waters, and the cold water below 60 feet holds them through the summer. Walleye fishing is solid in the shallower stretches, and northern pike and burbot round out what comes out of the lake.

Part of Snowbank lies inside the wilderness boundary, where outboard motors are capped at 25 horsepower, and part lies outside it with no such limit, so the lake sees more boat traffic than most water this far into the BWCA. Paddlers who want to skip the motors can put in from a separate, canoe-only access point on the same lake.

The forest around Snowbank and neighboring Disappointment Lake holds some of the oldest pine left in the wilderness, white and red pine standing more than 300 years old in places. The July 1999 windstorm that flattened huge stretches of the BWCA hit this area hard too, so alongside those old stands there's plenty of open ground and downed timber from trees that didn't survive it.

Ten campsites are spread across the lake, giving paddlers starting a trip here options for a first night before pushing on into the smaller lakes to the south. Snowbank works as well for a motor-assisted fishing trip as it does for the start of a longer paddling route, which is unusual for a lake this deep into lake trout water.