By Gene Kemmeter

What state has the most lakes? That question generally comes up many times when residents of Wisconsin and Minnesota get into discussions about which state is better, other than the usual banter about the Packers and Vikings or Badgers and Gophers.

Wisconsin Tourism Secretary Sara Meaney inserted herself into the most recent squabble in May when she said Wisconsin has 15,000 freshwater lakes, more than Minnesota which uses its license plates to proclaim itself as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) lists 15,047 lakes, while the Minnesota (DNR) lists 11,842.

That should end the discussion issue right there, but other factors muddy the waters. Minnesota defines a lake as a body of water greater than 10 acres. Wisconsin is less technical, it accepts anything as a lake as long as it’s called a lake. Thousands of Wisconsin lakes are less than 10 acres, and 60 percent of the “documented lakes” don’t have a name. Applying the 10-acre requirement, Wisconsin has only 5,898 lakes.

The U.S. Geological Survey doesn’t provide a nationally accepted definition of a lake, and the National Hydrography Dataset combines all inland water bodies of lakes, ponds, reservoirs and flowages into a single category, a lake/pond category. Thus, Minnesota has 124,662 lake/pond features, 8,784 of them named; while Wisconsin has 82,099, 5,481 named. Minnesota has 14,444 lake/pond features of 10 acres or more, and Wisconsin has 6,176. If official lakes have to be 25 acres, Minnesota has the edge there, 8,466 to 3,350.

Minnesota can also claim the largest lake. Red Lake in northern Minnesota covers 288,000 acres, the 16th largest lake in the United States, more than double the size of Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago, which is 137,708.

Wisconsin, however, has the deepest natural lake. Green Lake in central Wisconsin has a maximum depth of 236 feet, 28 feet deeper than Minnesota’s Ten Mile Lake in northcentral Minnesota.

In computing the surface area covered by lakes, Wisconsin dominates with 17 percent, compared to 8 percent for Minnesota. That amount is skewed, however, by including Lake Michigan and Lake Superior in the calculation. Excluding those Great Lakes from the figures leaves Minnesota with 5.4 percent of its surface area covered by lakes compared to 2.7 percent of Wisconsin.

Of course, Wisconsin and Minnesota are well behind the state with the most lakes, Alaska with an estimated 3 million, most of them unnamed. On the other side of the spectrum, Maryland has no natural lakes. All its lakes are manmade by damming rivers.

Does all this really matter? Essentially not. It’s just another measure of one person trying to boast about their state being better than another one, following the American legacy.

What really is important is that Wisconsinites and others get out and enjoy the lakes for fishing, swimming and other forms of recreation. They are part of our heritage and need to be maintained and preserved in pristine shape for generations to come, not become dried up ruins found by archaeologists.