How Lake Nipigon Compares To The Great Lakes

Everybody can rattle off the five Great Lakes. Almost nobody can name the lake quietly filling one of them. Meet Lake Nipigon, the largest lake entirely inside Ontario, which pours more water into Lake Superior than any other lake or river on Earth, and somehow still didn’t make the family photo. It is smaller than its famous cousins, sure. But it out-deeps one of them, sits higher than another, and grew the biggest brook trout in history. Here is how the overlooked “sixth Great Lake” actually stacks up.

Next to giants like Lake Superior, Nipigon is very much the little cousin at the kids’ table. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. At roughly 1,870 square miles, Lake Nipigon is enormous by normal-lake standards, the biggest lake lying entirely within Ontario, in fact. But parked next to the Great Lakes, it’s frankly adorable. It is only about a quarter the size of Lake Ontario, the smallest Great Lake by area, and roughly a fifth the size of Lake Erie. Drop Nipigon into Lake Superior and you would have real trouble finding it again. In the Great Lakes family, it is very much the little cousin seated at the kids’ table.

Shallow Lake Erie bottoms out at 210 feet; Nipigon plunges more than twice as deep. But don’t count the little guy out just yet, because this is where it starts throwing elbows. Lake Nipigon plunges to a maximum depth of about 541 feet, while mighty Lake Erie, a card-carrying Great Lake, bottoms out at a mere 210 feet. That’s right: the overlooked Ontario lake is more than twice as deep as one of the famous five. Erie may have all the name recognition, but in a diving contest, it would be left gasping at the surface while Nipigon kept on going.

Nipigon drains downhill into Lake Superior, the biggest freshwater lake on Earth. Now for the real power move. Lake Nipigon sits about 850 feet above sea level, which is some 250 feet higher than Lake Superior, and it drains straight downhill into it by way of the Nipigon River. That makes Nipigon and its river the single largest tributary feeding Lake Superior, the biggest freshwater lake on the entire planet. In other words, the lake nobody ever talks about literally helps fill the lake everybody does. It doesn’t just sit near the Great Lakes, it looks down on the greatest of them all and quietly tops it up.

The Nipigon River produced the world-record brook trout way back in 1915. Lake Nipigon also wildly overachieves when it comes to fish. Back in 1915, an angler hauled a brook trout weighing roughly 14.5 pounds out of the Nipigon River, which flows straight out of the lake. More than a century later, that still stands as the world-record brook trout, a mark no lake, river, or Great Lake has ever managed to beat. For a body of water most people have genuinely never heard of, growing the single biggest brook trout in recorded history is a serious flex.

Moose have been known to swim between Nipigon’s hundreds of islands. Nipigon is also wonderfully, defiantly empty. It is dotted with hundreds of islands, spaced far enough apart that moose have been known to swim between them, and it sits deep in remote boreal wilderness about 75 miles northeast of Thunder Bay. Compare that to the Great Lakes, whose shores are packed with some 30 million people and major cities like Chicago, Toronto, and Detroit. Out on Nipigon, the odds are good that your only company for the day is a loon, a pike, and the occasional paddling moose.

Remote and quiet, Nipigon does the Great Lakes’ work without any of the fame. Put it all together and Lake Nipigon has a genuinely strong case for itself. It feeds the mightiest of the Great Lakes, out-deeps another, perches hundreds of feet above a third, grew the record brook trout, and is even nicknamed, by the locals at least, “the sixth Great Lake.” And yet, when the official roll call was taken, it got left off the list entirely. Maybe it’s the remoteness, maybe it’s the modest size, or maybe the Great Lakes club just didn’t want the competition. Either way, Nipigon keeps right on doing the quiet, essential job of filling Lake Superior, no fancy title required. Not bad at all for the cousin nobody thought to invite to the family portrait.