Echo Lake (East Charleston, Vermont)
Echo Lake is located in the town of Charleston in Orleans County, Vermont, an area known as the Northeast Kingdom. It is one of only two deep, cold, and oligotrophic lakes in the Clyde River system. The first Surveyor-General of Vermont, Whitelaw, gave it the name of Echo Pond because when any sound was produced in its vicinity it was reverberated in various directions, producing a series of echoes
The freshwater lake covers 530 acres (2.1 km2) and is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long and 0.75 miles (1.21 km) at its widest, and drains a watershed area of 24 square miles (62 km2). Its maximum depth is 129 feet (39 m). The lake is fed by the outlet from Lake Seymour. The lake drains into the Clyde River, Lake Memphremagog, and, eventually, Canada’s St. Lawrence River.
The outlet dam is used for hydroelectric power. Construction was completed in 1922 and was reconstructed in 1984. It is owned by Citizens Utilities Company. The dam is concrete with a homogeneous concrete core and a rock foundation. The height is 16 feet (4.9 m) by 120 feet (37 m). Maximum discharge is 693 cubic feet (19.6 m3) per second. Its capacity is 5,000 acre-feet (6,200,000 m3). Normal storage is 3,180 acre-feet (3,920,000 m3).
The lake supports a coldwater fishery. There are wild lake trout. It also has rainbow trout (wild and stocked), brook trout (stocked), rainbow smelt, yellow perch, smallmouth bass, landlocked salmon, chain pickerel, longnose sucker, white sucker, burbot, various species of minnow, and probably others uncataloged.