Gold Lake

Where Gold Lake is

Gold Lake lies in the County of Peterborough, with shoreline in the Township of North Kawartha and the Municipality of Trent Lakes.

How deep is Gold Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Gold Lake is 36.6 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 17 depth contours for Gold Lake.

See also Ontario's Largest and Deepest Lakes

Surveyed Depths

Ontario has surveyed the depths of several thousand of its lakes over more than half a century. Later surveys were conducted by boat with satellite positioning and produced hundreds of thousands of soundings per lake. Earlier surveys were charted by running transects across the water and drawing depth contours by hand.

Water quality

Ontario’s Lake Partner Program is a volunteer monitoring network. Participants collect water samples for phosphorus analysis and measure water clarity through the summer with a Secchi disk. Most sites are sampled for phosphorus once a year, in spring, and some several times a year between spring and fall. Phosphorus in many lakes rises through the summer, so the two kinds of average are measured on different bases.

Phosphorus is the nutrient that controls how much algae a lake can grow. A lake with little phosphorus stays clear and supports cold-water fish such as lake trout. As phosphorus rises, algae increase, the water clouds, and oxygen in the deep water falls as the algae decay. The province classifies each monitoring site by its average phosphorus:

• Oligotrophic, below 10 micrograms per litre: clear water and low algae.
• Mesotrophic, from 10 to 20: moderately productive water, with more algae and weed growth than an oligotrophic lake but rarely a bloom.
• Eutrophic, above 20: nutrient-rich water, prone to algal blooms and low oxygen at depth.

Gold Lake has 1 Lake Partner monitoring site, which has yet reported phosphorus for the three years the province requires before a status is assigned.

A Secchi disk is a white or black-and-white plate lowered on a marked line until it disappears from view. The depth at which it vanishes is the Secchi depth, a direct measure of water clarity. Clearer water gives a deeper reading.

See also Lake Water Quality and Blue-Green Algae in Ontario

Gold Lake Weather

The weather page for Gold Lake carries the forecast over the water, wave heights across the lake, and the modelled water temperature.

Gold Lake weather

Water temperature

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Gold Lake. The LastLake model computes the temperature of its surface water for each day from the daily mean air temperature at Environment Canada’s Peterborough Trentu Farm climate station, 41 kilometers from the lake, or the next nearest station when its record is incomplete, and from the lake’s area of 332 hectares and its mean depth. The province’s records give no mean depth for Gold Lake; the model uses 13.1 meters, estimated from the lake’s depth contours.

Each day’s figure carries the model’s typical error for that month on lakes of the same size. The figure in the chart below is the temperature near the surface, away from the shoreline. Bays, shallows and water deeper below the surface differ in temperature. Temperature is not measured when ice covers the lake. The weather page for Gold Lake carries the model’s figures for the past weeks and the coming week.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Gold Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records list no species for Gold Lake. The province’s other records for the lake name one species, lake trout. It appears in the records below.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 6 fish spawning records within the Gold Lake outline: 6 lake trout spawning areas covering 0.06 hectares.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout6 areas600 m²

The federal Fisheries Act prohibits the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat without an authorization, so a dock, dredging, infill or shoreline work at a mapped spawning area is reviewed on that basis.

Fisheries Management Zone 15

Gold Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 15. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone. The province describes it as a zone of many natural lake trout and brook trout lakes, with a well-developed road network and moderate angling effort.

Fisheries management zones around Gold Lake

See also Fishing Seasons in Ontario, Zone by Zone and Fish Stocking in Ontario Lakes

Gold Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Gold Lake must be removed by March 31. The province sets dates for ice hut removal as a safety measure to ensure huts are removed before thawing occurs. One date applies to an entire fisheries management zone (FMZ). Gold Lake lies within FMZ 15.

An ice hut must also be removed before the ice breaks up, whether or not that date has passed. The deadline clears huts from the ice ahead of the thaw and does not close the fishing season.

Registration is required in FMZ 15 for an ice hut built of anything other than fabric, and for a fabric tent covering seven square meters or more. Registration is free, and the number is displayed on the outside of the hut.

Ice Out Date

The ice has been recorded leaving Gold Lake in 26 springs between 1970 and 1995. The median date is April 21. The earliest recorded break-up is April 4 in 1981, and the latest is May 6 in 1978.

Across the 26 recorded springs the date has moved earlier by about 2.8 days each decade.

The record was contributed by Peter J. Dillon, Ontario Ministry of the Environment to the Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database. The record only holds the ice-out dates for Gold Lake, and no ice-in date.

Ice out dates for 26 recorded springs between 1970 and 1995

Ice conditions

No public record reports the thickness or the condition of the ice on Gold Lake on any given day. Ontario publishes ice safety guidance for anyone going out on the ice, at ontario.ca.

See also Lake Ice in Ontario and When the Lakes Will Freeze This Winter

Islands and names

Gold Lake contains five islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, one of them over 10 hectares and two under a tenth of a hectare.

Nearby lakes

• Beaver Lake3 km away
• Mississagua Lake5 km away
• Catchacoma Lake5 km away
• Anstruther Lake5 km away

All lakes

Questions about Gold Lake

• How deep is Gold Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 36.6 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Gold Lake?

  Its surface covers 3.3 square kilometers and it holds 5 islands. Of its 26 kilometers of shoreline, 23 kilometers is the mainland shore and 3 kilometers is the shore of the islands.