Geography
Lake Shetek covers 3,596 acres (1,455 ha) to a maximum depth of just 10 feet (3.0 m). This modest depth is wholly typical for the Prairie Pothole Region. The shoreline totals 31.7 miles (51.0 km), about 85% of which is in private development. The watershed-to-lake ratio is 23:1, with much of that watershed under cultivation.
Lake Shetek is by far the largest of Murray County's hundred or so lakes. The next largest is currently 1,176-acre (476 ha) Lake Sarah just to the northwest. Great Oasis Lake at 1,466 acres (593 ha) was once second-largest but was drained in the early 20th century for farmland.
It is the headwaters of the West Fork of the Des Moines River, considered the river's main fork. Lake Shetek contains three main islands: Valhalla, Keeley, and Loon Islands. Causeways connect the first two to the western shore, and another connects the third to the eastern shore. Shetek also connects to Bloody Lake and Armstrong Lake.
Read more about this topic: Lake Shetek
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)