Red Lake

Red Lake, in northern Minnesota, is the largest lake lying entirely within the state — a pair of broad, shallow basins, Upper and Lower Red Lake, joined at a narrows and covering about 427 square miles (1,106 km²) together. Shallow and rimmed by marsh and forest, it sits on the flat bed of glacial Lake Agassiz, the colossal Ice Age lake that once drowned much of the region.

Almost all of the lake lies within the Red Lake Indian Reservation, home of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and it is one of the few large U.S. lakes held entirely by a tribal nation, closed to non-member fishing. Its walleye fishery, once collapsed, became a celebrated recovery story after the band and the state rebuilt it. The lake drains, fittingly, into the Red River of the North, which flows toward Canada and Hudson Bay.

• Minnesota
  The Land of 10,000 Lakes, headwaters of the Mississippi located in