Like any good Minnesotan, I know the Land of 10,000 lakes is actually home to 11,842 — though even that number is up for debate.
Let's set aside the lake definition discussion for just a moment. Because this all started earlier this month when I had a different question: How many lakes are there in each Minnesota county?
I’m not the first to ask, but Department of Natural Resources climatologist Pete Boulay said the answer’s not so easy.
While DNR climatologists don’t oversee the state’s cataloguing of public waters, Boulay is involved in the process of naming lakes and other water features and offered some insight.
Using statutory definitions of 10 acres or greater in unincorporated areas and 2.5 acres or greater in incorporated areas gets us to that 11,842 number, according to Boulay.
“If you grab everything, including wetlands, or 2.5 acres or greater in the entire state, you get up to about 21,871 basins,” Boulay said. “So, depending on how you look at it, Minnesota’s got a lot, any way you slice it, really.”
Other agencies may define a lake differently. That’s the source of the perennial debate between us and Wisconsin over who really has more lakes. There, “lakes” are 2.2 acres or larger, giving the state some 15,000 lakes. Still less than 21,871, but who’s counting?
But back to the Land of 10,000 — 11,842? More? — Lakes and the original county count question.
Boulay analyzed DNR data from 2018 to give us a rough estimate. According to his calculation of the Public Waters Inventory, St. Louis County wins the title for most lakes with 890, followed by Itasca with 870 and Cook with 850.
Note that that’s a rough estimate. It includes man-made lakes. It also totals up to 11,799 lakes. DNR hydrologists guessed this may be caused by variations in data sets, rounding errors, double counting, absence of lake chains or any number of other details that make working with large datasets challenging. So, we’ll forgive the missing 43 lakes and assume it doesn’t change the county count too drastically.
The leaderboard also changes some if you count all basins using the definition that got us that 21,871 number. According to that rough estimate, St. Louis County stays on top with 1,515. But Otter Tail jumps from fifth to second with 1,286, pushing Itasca to third with 1,161.
“We're the land of, we say, 10,000 lakes,” Boulay concluded. “But we have a lot more than that.”
