Frost Woods Beach is a City of Monona pocket park on Wiicawak Bay, the sheltered southeast arm of Lake Monona, at the 5800 block of Winnequah Road in Dane County. It is genuinely small: OpenStreetMap puts the sand at roughly 80 feet of shoreline, tucked into heavy woods with private yards on either side. The parking lot sits up on Winnequah Road and a gate keeps cars off the shore, so you walk the last stretch in under the trees. No entry fee, no attendant, no residency requirement to swim.

This is bay swimming, not clear-lake swimming. Wiicawak Bay is shallow and slow to flush, and the Wisconsin DNR rates Lake Monona's water clarity as low, so expect warm, soft green water you cannot see your feet in. It shelves gently off the sand, shallow enough that local shore anglers treat the beach as a place to break in a new pair of waders. Public Health Madison and Dane County logged 67 degrees in the near-shore water on its first test of the 2026 season in late May. Lake Monona runs about 3,274 acres and 74 feet deep at its deepest, but none of that depth is anywhere near this beach.

The season is set by bacteria and algae rather than by crowds. Public Health Madison and Dane County tests Frost Woods weekly for E. coli and blue-green algae from Memorial Day through Labor Day, and posts the beach closed when a sample comes back high. Heavy rain followed by hot, still, sunny weather is the pattern that does it: runoff carries fertilizer, pet waste and soil into the lake, then cyanobacteria take over the warm shallows. In late June 2026 blue-green algae piled up along the Lake Monona shoreline thick enough that residents compared the water to pea soup, and the health department went to daily sampling. Every beach on the lake has been closed at once before. After Labor Day the county listing flips to closed for the season, which means the testing stops rather than the beach locking. Check the county beach page the morning you go, and if the water looks or smells like a bloom, stay out.

Facilities are thin, and worth knowing before you drive over. Picnic tables, deep shade, a trash can and the small lot. No restrooms, no changing rooms, no pier and no lifeguards; Monona posts no lifeguards at either of its beaches, in any season. Schluter, the city's other Lake Monona beach farther along Winnequah Road, has the bathrooms, the dock and the playground. Frost Woods Park, with the ballfield and playground a couple hundred yards inland, is a separate park. Monona rents seasonal canoe and kayak rack space here for $155 a year for residents and $310 for non-residents, May 1 to April 30, awarded by a March lottery that gives residents priority; non-residents get in if space is left. Carrying a boat down and launching off the sand costs nothing. Dogs are barred from the delineated beach and must stay 20 feet back from it.

The name comes from the neighborhood behind the beach, platted in 1929 and home to some of the first International Style houses built in Wisconsin, a few finished by 1931. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in February 2026, and a panther effigy mound raised roughly 1,500 years ago still sits in these woods. The park dates to 1952. Lake Monona freezes for about 107 days in a typical winter, and the same lot and shore access serves ice fishermen in January.