“The crappies are biting like crazy right now,” Webster County Conservation Director Matt Cosgrove said Saturday morning.

The fact that the lake north of Fort Dodge is the site of good fishing once again can be attributed to a major restoration project completed in 2021. Cosgrove described the project during the second Coffee and Conservation session held Saturday morning. About 15 people attended the event in the Matt Cosgrove River’s Edge Discovery Center in downtown Fort Dodge.

Badger Lake was created by damming part of Badger Creek. The dam was completed in 1963. The lake was filled and in 1965 the park was named for the president who had been assassinated two years earlier

In 1988, a silt pond was created at the park’s northeast end to capture sediment coming down Badger Creek and prevent it from getting into the lake. In 1991, the lake was dredged.

-Messenger photo by Bill Shea
A lone park visitor relaxes Saturday morning on the beach at Badger Lake in John F. Kennedy Memorial Park. A 2021 restoration project that made the lake the attractive body of water it is today was the subject of a Coffee and Conservation talk Saturday at the Matt Cosgrove River’s Edge Discovery Center.

The restoration project resulted from loss of fish during the winter of 2021, according to Cosgrove. He said the oxygen level in the lake dropped and hundreds of fish turned up dead on the shore.

Local conservation officials consulted with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and learned that a complete lake restoration was needed.

The projects started in August of 2021 after the Badger Lake Dragon Boat Bash was over.

The first step in the project was to actually kill the rest of the fish. Cosgrove said the DNR put a chemical into the water that finished off the fish without harming the frogs and turtles.

The next step was to get a lot of water out of the lake. Cosgrove said the lake level had to be reduced by 50 percent. That meant a lot of water had to be pumped out.

Cogrove said local resident Tim Lennon donated the use of a high capacity pump for the project. He added that K.C. Nielsen, a John Deere dealership in Humboldt, donated the use of a tractor to power the pump.

That pump ran 12 to 15 hours a day, according to Cosgrove, As the water level got lower, the tractor and pump had to be moved farther out into the exposed lake bed.

When sufficient water had been removed, excavators and bulldozers were used to remove accumulated silt from the lake bed. Nels Pederson Co. Inc., of Badger, and Russ’s Construction, of Fort Dodge, were the contractors on the job.

Cosgrove said he is sometimes asked to identify the strangest thing that was found as the lake bed was excavated. His answer: the complete skeleton of a horse.

While the lake bed was exposed, reefs made of rock and other features that would attract fish after they were submerged, were created.

“We put in a ton of fish habitat,” he said.

Late in the year, after tons of silt were removed, the lake was allowed to refill with water. The DNR stocked it with catfish, bluegill and large mouth bass.

Now, the lake is 16 feet deep at its deepest point.

The project cost $250,000, which Cosgrove said is inexpensive for a major lake restoration project. That money came from a trust fund created by setting aside half of the money received from campground rentals and other fees collected by Webster County Conservation.