Haliburton Lake

Where Haliburton Lake is

Haliburton Lake lies in the County of Haliburton, within the Municipality of Dysart Et Al.

How deep is Haliburton Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Haliburton Lake is 50.0 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. The chart is drawn from 73 depth contours recorded during Ontario’s 1975 survey.

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.

Haliburton Lake Aerial Photography

Ontario photographs the province from the air on a rolling schedule.

The photograph below is from the SCOOP2023 collection.

Water quality

Ontario’s Lake Partner Program is a volunteer monitoring network. Participants collect a water sample each spring for phosphorus analysis and measure water clarity through the summer with a Secchi disk.

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 spring phosphorus. Below 10 micrograms per litre is oligotrophic: clear water and low algae. From 10 to 20 is mesotrophic: moderately productive water, with more algae and weed growth than an oligotrophic lake but rarely a bloom. Above 20 is eutrophic: nutrient-rich water, prone to algal blooms and low oxygen at depth.

A Secchi disk is a 20 centimeter 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.

Haliburton Lake has 6 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Two have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. All are classified oligotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 1830/1 at Mid Lake, deep spot, sampled over 11 springs to 2022. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 4.32 micrograms per litre, within the oligotrophic band, which extends to 10. The site’s 38 clarity readings give a median Secchi depth of 6.1 meters.

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Haliburton Lake as a cold-water lake.

A lake separates into layers through the summer where it is deep enough. Sunlight and wind warm and mix the upper few meters, and beneath a band of rapid cooling, the thermocline, the water stays cold. A shallow lake mixes to the bottom instead and warms through, sooner in spring and later into autumn.

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Haliburton Lake. The province’s longest in-water record is kept on eight research lakes near Dorset, sampled since 1976. A reading is taken at the surface, at one meter, at each meter to seven and then every two meters to the bottom, about every two weeks through the open-water season and about monthly under ice. The record holds 5,240 readings at a depth of one meter.

At one meter the eight lakes track one another closely. On a day when several were sampled, the warmest and the coolest lake differed by about one degree in every month of the year, and a 12 meter deep lake and a 37 meter deep lake read within 0.2 degrees of each other from June to October. The weather of the year, and not the lake, sets most of the width of the band below.

Satellite thermal imagery gives a surface reading on clear days: the Landsat sensors pass over Haliburton Lake every eight days at a resolution of 100 meters. In the province’s record the surface reading and the one meter reading agree to within half a degree nine times in ten in summer.

The water a few meters down is colder than any figure on this chart, in every month of the year.

How depth changes the temperature

The chart below is the province’s record on Harp Lake, 37 meters deep, drawn as the median temperature at each depth for each month over 49 years. In July the water at one meter is 23 degrees, at five meters 15, at seven meters 9, and from 13 meters to the bottom under 6. By October the warm layer has deepened to seven meters and cooled to 11 degrees. In February the whole column sits between 1 and 4 degrees under the ice, coldest at the top.

A shallower lake in the same record warms sooner. Heney Lake, six meters deep, reads about 1.8 degrees warmer than Harp Lake at one meter from January to May, 0.8 degrees warmer from June to August, and the same or cooler from September.

Fish in Haliburton Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 18 fish species in Haliburton Lake. The province classes the lake as cold water. The record took effect on 6 August 2024, and it compiles what field biologists had reported by then.

Ten of the eighteen species in the province’s records

• Lake Trouttrout and whitefish
• Lake Whitefishtrout and whitefish
• Ciscotrout and whitefish
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Burbotcod
• Brown Bullheadcatfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 11 fish spawning records within the Haliburton Lake outline: 11 lake trout spawning areas covering 0.69 hectares.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Lake Trout11 areas0.7 ha

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.

Stocking history

Ontario’s stocking records for Haliburton Lake run from 1946 to 1989 and hold 32 releases. Lake Trout account for most of the fish: 109,200 released in 29 of the years between 1946 and 1989. The last recorded release was 6,000 lake trout yearlings in 1989.

The province’s current stocking programme, recorded from 2016, lists no release into Haliburton Lake.

Eating the fish

The 2025 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for four species taken from Haliburton Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Harburn Twp., Haliburton Co. Each figure below is the most meals a month the guide advises for a fish of that length. The advice falls as the fish gets longer, because mercury accumulates over a fish’s life. A zero means the guide advises no meals of that fish at that size.

General population adultsSensitive population children under fifteen, women who are or may become pregnant

Fisheries Management Zone 15

Haliburton Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 15. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone. Zone 15 covers central Ontario from Georgian Bay to the Ottawa River, bounded to the north by the Pickerel River, Highway 522 and the northern edge of Algonquin Park. It takes in Parry Sound, Huntsville, Bracebridge, Bancroft, Pembroke and Renfrew, and the whole of Algonquin Provincial Park. 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.

The figures are the number of fish an angler may catch and keep in a day and have in possession, under a sport fishing licence and under a conservation licence. The rows are the whole zone’s, and they apply to every lake in it. No waterbody exception names Haliburton Lake.

Haliburton Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Haliburton Lake must be removed by March 31. Haliburton Lake lies in fisheries management zone 15, one of the twenty zones Ontario sets its fishing rules by, and one removal date applies across the whole zone.

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 zone 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.

When the ice goes out

The ice has been recorded leaving Haliburton Lake in sixteen springs between 1975 and 1994. The median date is April 27. The earliest recorded break-up is April 5 in 1981, and the latest is May 10 in 1992.

Across the sixteen recorded springs the date has moved later by about 4.2 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. It holds the day the ice left and carries no date for the day it formed, so it says nothing about when Haliburton Lake freezes.

Ice conditions

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

Getting on the water

Four access marks are mapped on Haliburton Lake: two boat launches, one marina and one beach. One is Ontario’s own record, one is from the Overture Places dataset and two are operator entries, and the list under the map says which is which. Boat launch is the province’s class for a ramp.

Islands and names

Haliburton Lake contains 9 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, two of them over 10 hectares and four under a tenth of a hectare.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 2 official names on the water and its islands: .

Communities on the lake 1

• Fort Irwin

Nearby lakes

• Percy Lake3 km away
• Eagle Lake9 km away
• Redstone Lake11 km away
• Drag Lake13 km away

All lakes

Questions about Haliburton Lake

• How deep is Haliburton Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 50 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Haliburton Lake?

  Its surface covers 10.3 square kilometers and it holds 9 islands. Of its 41 kilometers of shoreline, 35 kilometers is the mainland shore and 6 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Haliburton Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name eighteen species, among them lake trout, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, lake whitefish and yellow perch.

• Is the water clear?

  All two monitoring sites with a phosphorus status are classified oligotrophic, the clearest of the province’s three bands.

• Is there a public boat launch?

  Records mark two boat launches, one marina and one beach on Haliburton Lake.