Trout Lake

Trout Lake covers 7,425 acres in the La Croix district of the Boundary Waters, near Tower on the wilderness's west side, and unlike most lakes this size it sits right at the edge rather than days in. A short portage off Lake Vermilion gets you there fast, and a local operator will even haul your boat across by motorized cart for a fee.

The shoreline folds into bays and wraps around a scatter of islands rather than sitting as one open sheet, so crossing the lake means picking a line through the islands rather than a straight shot. It drops to 98 feet in its deepest basin, but only about a fifth of the lake is shallow enough to fish from the surface down, and the water runs clear over boulder, rubble, and ledge rock close to shore. Weed growth thins out by around 12 feet down.

Trout Lake is one of the few BWCAW waters where motors are allowed, capped at 25 horsepower, and it's managed as a day-use motor entry alongside the overnight paddling permits, a mix of traffic you won't find on most interior lakes. Long open crossings come with a lake this size, though the bays give you somewhere to duck into once the wind picks up.

Fishing here runs cold and deep. Cisco fill the depths, and lake trout share that same cold water, one of the wilderness's stocked lake trout lakes. Walleye work the shallower rock and shoreline instead, with smallmouth bass rounding out the mix along the same rocky edges.

Forty-two campsites are spread across all that shoreline, leaving plenty of room to spread out on a lake this size.

Trout Lake is more of a fishing destination than a place to find solitude, its size and motorized access putting more boats on the water than most interior lakes in the wilderness ever see.