Little Bald Lake

Where Little Bald Lake is

Little Bald Lake lies in the County of Peterborough, within the Municipality of Trent Lakes.

How deep is Little Bald Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Little Bald Lake is 7.3 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. Ontario’s bathymetry record holds 44 depth contours for Little Bald 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.

No monitoring site on Little Bald Lake is registered with the Lake Partner Program, so no phosphorus or clarity record exists for the lake.

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

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Little Bald Lake as a warm-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 Little Bald 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.

Water temperature at a depth of one meter (eight lakes near Dorset, ON)

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.

See also Lake Water Temperature in Ontario

Fish in Little Bald Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 11 fish species in Little Bald Lake.

Popular species in the province’s records

• Muskellungepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Black Crappiesunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Bluegillsunfish
• Common Carpminnow

Fisheries Management Zone 17

Little Bald Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 17. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone.

Fisheries management zones around Little Bald Lake

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

Little Bald Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Little Bald Lake must be removed by March 1. 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). Little Bald Lake lies within FMZ 17.

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 17 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 In / Out Date

No ice record is kept on Little Bald Lake. The province’s nearest long record covers eight lakes near Dorset, about 84 kilometers away. It holds a date for every winter since 1975, observed by eye and from cameras set on the shore.

On those eight lakes the median date of complete ice cover is December 7 and the median date of complete ice loss is April 20, a median season of 134 days.

The date the ice forms has moved later through the record: a November 26 average across 1971 to 1980, and December 11 across 2011 to 2020. The date it leaves has moved by less than a day each decade over the same period. The two charts below are drawn to one scale of 26 days, so they can be read against each other.

Ice in date (eight lakes near Dorset, ON)

Ice out date (eight lakes near Dorset, ON)

Ice conditions

No public record reports the thickness or the condition of the ice on Little Bald 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

Islands and names

Little Bald Lake contains 52 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, zero of them over 10 hectares and 29 under a tenth of a hectare. Twenty-eight of them lie mostly inside wetland the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset maps as marsh or open water. The largest two, of 2.9 and 1.5 hectares, fall inside the Little Bald Lake Complex.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 2 official names on the water and its islands: one narrows and one river. The register records the origin of one name: Miskwaa Ziibi, “Name taken from the presence of red granite and soil along the river bed and shores, Miskwaa meaning 'red' and ziibi meaning 'river'.”

Harbours, cuts and narrows 1

• Big Bald Narrows

Nearby lakes

• Big Bald Lake3 km away
• Sandy Lake3 km away
• Buckhorn Lake9 km away
• Lower Buckhorn Lake10 km away

All lakes

Questions about Little Bald Lake

• How deep is Little Bald Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 7.3 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Little Bald Lake?

  Its surface covers 1.9 square kilometers and it holds 52 islands. Of its 29 kilometers of shoreline, 18 kilometers is the mainland shore and 11 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Little Bald Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name eleven species, among them walleye, largemouth bass, muskellunge, yellow perch and black crappie.