Minneapolis's lakes, the ones the park board looks after

Map of 11 locations in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Since 1991 the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has sampled the same set of thirteen lakes, a list that began as a diagnostic study for the Chain of Lakes Clean Water Partnership and now decides which beaches get algae advisories and which shorelines get rebuilt. The lakes on it range from 421 acres and 90 feet deep to a 2.3-acre pocket that barely qualifies as a lake at all, and several are not where you would expect: one drains a watershed the size of a county, another sits in Golden Valley. What follows is the measured version of each: area, depth, catchment, what the water is used for, and what it used to be called.

Places in this collection

  • Wirth Lake — Thirty-nine acres of water that the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board monitors even though the lake is not inside Minneapolis: it is a…
  • Spring Lake — At 2.3 acres this is well under the five-acre threshold some limnologists use to separate a lake from a pond, and it is one of the smallest…
  • Powderhorn Lake — A natural lake of 11.38 acres with a shoreline of 0.62 miles and a maximum depth of 24 feet, which is deep for its size and keeps it fishab…
  • Lake of the Isles — One hundred and three acres and 30.8 feet deep on a 735-acre watershed, connected by channel to both Bde Maka Ska and Cedar, which is what…
  • Lake Nokomis — Two hundred and four acres, 33.1 feet at its deepest, formerly Lake Amelia. It has two public beaches, both monitored weekly through the su…
  • Lake Hiawatha — Fifty-four acres and 23 feet deep, but with a watershed of 115,840 acres, two orders of magnitude larger than any other lake in the city, b…
  • Lake Harriet — Three hundred and fifty-three acres and 82 feet deep, second only to Bde Maka Ska on both counts, with a 1,139-acre watershed. Minnehaha Pa…
  • Diamond Lake — Forty-one acres of water with a maximum depth of 6.9 feet, which puts it among the shallowest of the monitored lakes and explains why its w…
  • Cedar Lake — One hundred and seventy acres, 50.9 feet at its deepest, and a 1,956-acre watershed, the second largest catchment of the Chain of Lakes gro…
  • Brownie Lake — Eighteen acres of surface water with 49.9 feet under it, which makes Brownie the smallest and one of the steeper-sided links in the Chain o…
  • Bde Maka Ska — At 421 acres and a maximum depth of 89.9 feet, this is the largest and deepest lake inside the city limits, draining a watershed of 2,992 a…

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