Lake Thompson Walleye Tourney

Lake Thompson, a natural glacial lake at 1,740 feet elevation in Kingsbury County, South Dakota, holds the distinction of being the largest natural lake entirely within the state’s borders, covering roughly 15,000 acres at full pool across the prairie plateau east of the Missouri Coteau. The lake’s walleye population has sustained both commercial harvest and tournament fishing for over a century, and the Lake Thompson Walleye Tourney, returning June 6–8, 2026, continues a community tradition that places the walleye at the center of Lake Preston’s identity in the way that few other fish-to-town relationships in the northern plains can match. The event launches from the Lake Preston public access area, with competition running across the tournament’s three-day program.

Lake Thompson’s fishery character reflects the shallow, nutrient-rich profile typical of large South Dakota prairie lakes: turbid water that concentrates walleye in predictable depth bands on structure that rewards methodical trolling and drift-jigging over the kind of technical finesse work that clearer-water fisheries demand. Early June conditions at this latitude typically push walleye into post-spawn patterns on the rock-cobble points and wind-driven current breaks that define the lake’s eastern and northern shores. A kids’ fishing derby runs alongside the main tournament, providing a participatory entry point for younger visitors not competing at the adult level. Food trucks, artisan vendors, and live music fill the tournament weekend’s social programming.

Lake Preston and the Glacial Lakes Country

Lake Preston is a small agricultural community in Kingsbury County whose economy has been organized around grain farming and lake-based recreation in roughly equal measure since its founding in the 1880s. The broader Kingsbury County landscape sits squarely within the Prairie Pothole Region, where the last glaciation deposited thousands of kettle lakes and wetland basins that now constitute the most productive waterfowl breeding habitat in North America. Sandhill cranes and greater white-fronted geese use the Thompson basin and surrounding marshes during spring and fall migration in numbers that draw serious birders from across the region. The De Smet community, nine miles north on SD-25 and the birthplace of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, preserves several sites from the Ingalls family’s homesteading period, including the original surveyor’s house and the claim shanty, which are open for tours through the summer season.

If You’re Going with Kids
The Laura Ingalls Wilder sites at De Smet represent some of the most direct connections to the homesteading narrative of the Great Plains available anywhere in the region. Children who have read the Little House series find the physical persistence of the sites — the same claim shanty, the same surveyor’s house — distinctly more affecting than museum reconstructions. The annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant at the outdoor amphitheater in De Smet runs in July and provides a structured dramatic interpretation of the family’s homesteading years that children from approximately age 7 upward engage with consistently.

Nearby Accommodations

Lake Preston’s limited lodging consists primarily of the campground adjacent to the public access area and a small inventory of local motel and rental options. Brookings, 35 miles east on I-29, provides the most complete hotel and restaurant inventory within a manageable tournament-week commute. For vacation rental properties in the South Dakota glacial lakes country near Lake Preston, look on Lake.com.