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2026-10-19 · Hubbard County lakes around Park Rapids (Long Lake and county public accesses, north-central Minnesota)

45 Landings, One 4-H Club, and a Lot of Old Fishing Line — Hubbard County's Lake Crew Had a Year

Hubbard County's Coalition of Lake Associations spent 2026 putting cleaning tool sets at 70 public accesses, and the Targets and Trails 4-H Club built fishing line recycling tubes for 45 landings to keep loons out of old line. The kids also went fishing on Long Lake with Let's Go Fishing and tested the water for zebra mussel DNA while they waited on bobbers.

Every angler has a wad of old line somewhere. Mine lives in a cupholder in the truck. It’s been there so long it has opinions. Up around Park Rapids, a bunch of 4-H kids decided that wad deserves a better home than a cupholder, or a shoreline, or a loon.

The tubes

Members of the Targets and Trails 4-H Club spent 2025 and 2026 putting together fishing line recycling tubes for Hubbard County’s Coalition of Lake Associations, which everybody just calls COLA. According to COLA’s year-end column in the Park Rapids Enterprise, those tubes now stand at 45 public accesses around the county. The point is simple: keep loons and other wildlife from getting tangled in line somebody meant to throw away later.

Then grown-ups stepped in for the unglamorous part. Local volunteers swing by to empty the tubes now and then, and check that the boat-cleaning tool sets are still there.

Look, I’ve never once in my life emptied anything on a schedule. These folks do it for line that isn’t even theirs.

The cleaning stations

Before the walleye opener in early May, COLA put cleaning stations with tool sets at 70 public accesses in the county. Each one comes with a “clean, drain, dry” boater checklist and the number to book the free decontamination station in Park Rapids.

Seventy. That’s a lot of landings. That’s a lot of folks pulling in at 5:40 a.m. with a coffee in one hand and the trailer strap in the other, and a little sign quietly asking them to do the right thing first.

Bobbers and science

The best part of the year might have been on Long Lake. COLA teamed up with the Let’s Go Fishing Headwaters Chapter, which took the 4-H crew out fishing. While everybody waited on the bobbers to go under, the kids learned about lake monitoring tools and took part in a University of Minnesota eDNA test, sampling the lake water for zebra mussel DNA.

So picture it. A boat full of 4-H kids, lines in the water, somebody’s bobber doing absolutely nothing, and in the meantime they’re running actual lab work for the U. When I was that age, my big contribution to science was finding out a nightcrawler can escape a Cool Whip tub.

Several COLA member lakes ran the same eDNA test this year, with 15 samples on each lake.

The rest of the list

The column runs long, in the good way:

  • Volunteers did rake tosses on three lakes and coached more than 75 people on identifying aquatic plants and spotting invasive species early.
  • A youth group of 50 young men built more than 100 zebra mussel settlement samplers, which COLA hands out free for docks.
  • More than 700 people stopped by the COLA booth during the five-day Hubbard County Fair, where the group handed out lead-free tackle samples from the state’s Loon Restoration Program.
  • At a summer concert downtown, a K-9 unit showed off sniffing out zebra mussels on a fishing boat. Somewhere a lab retriever saw that and felt underemployed.

If you’re taking your dock out

COLA’s “Eyes on the Water” survey is open through December. When your dock, lift, or sampler comes out of the water this fall, they want to hear what you found, and they want to hear even if you found nothing. A clean report counts. The group credits the late Dan Kittilson with building that program, and it’s still running the way he set it up, one lake owner at a time.

The Oct. 29 COLA meeting is open to the public and will cover the 2026 watercraft inspection report. In early November, volunteers will pull the cleaning tool sets and clean them up for next spring.

The part that matters

None of this is flashy. It’s tubes and checklists and kids sampling lake water while they wait on a bite. But a loon doesn’t care who wins a tournament. It cares whether there’s line in the reeds. Up here, the folks who keep the lakes good mostly do it quietly, and some of them are still in 4-H.

Next time you pull into a Hubbard County landing, find the tube and feed it your cupholder wad. Somebody’s kid built that thing.

Sources

Source 1 → Source 2 → Source 3 →

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