Live Webcams in Spirit Lake

Spirit Lake, Iowa, is the town beside the state's largest natural lake, on the Minnesota border, and the live webcams in Spirit Lake put you on the water: a glacial lake four miles long, busy with boats from May, frozen and dotted with ice-fishing shacks by February. Open lake and shoreline are the whole picture, with the weather of the northern plains arriving across it unobstructed. The town keeps Central Time, UTC−6, UTC−5 in summer, so a European evening is an Iowa lunchtime, and the boats are thickest on a summer weekend afternoon, around nine at night in London. The lake covers some 5,600 acres yet averages only 17 feet deep, a meltwater pothole left by the glacier that shaped the whole of the Iowa Great Lakes. Summer is the season; the freeze is the other one.