Residents Seeking Golden Pond at Mud Lake

One man’s mud is another man’s gold.

For 10 years, Larry and Jane Ringhoffer have had to persuade friends to visit them at their lovely Mud Lake home.

“People ask where we live, we say, ‘Mud Lake,’ ” Ringhoffer said. “Aesthetically, it’s not very pleasing. There were some negative connotations.”

And with three Mud Lakes in northeastern Minnesota’s St. Louis County, it also was confusing.

That’s why the Ringhoffers recently filed a petition complete with the 15 necessary signatures to have the name changed to Golden Pond.

“That was my wife’s idea. It was kind of nostalgic,” said Ringhoffer, a 66-year-old retiree, referring to the 1981 Oscar-winning movie “On Golden Pond” starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. “We’re not on a very big lake. It’s only about 25 acres, but to us, it’s Golden Pond.”

The St. Louis County Board has set a public hearing on the name change for Sept. 15 in Duluth.

Ringhoffer thinks the odds are in his favor because he and his wife own all the land surrounding the lake. They are the only ones who live on it and plan to keep it that way.

As appealing as the name Golden Pond is to the Ringhoffers, there’s not another lake with that name in the Land of 10,000 lakes. But there are more than 200 Mud Lakes in the state, making it the most common lake name. Long Lake ranks second with 118 entries, said Glen Yakel, supervisor of hydrographics with the state Department of Natural Resources.