Early Ice-The good, the bad and the beautiful.

We had an early cold spell in Northern Vermont that created a lot skateable but dicey ice. It looks like nobody fell through but there was no shortage of places to do so.  The following is a review of what we found as a way to present many of the wonderful and less than wonderful aspects of early ice.

We have been skating on three ponds in Northern New York (Russet, Bartlett and Lincoln ponds) north of Mineville and a few other areas in Vermont.  The following is the temperature history for Burlington VT.  The temperature at the New York ponds was about 5 degrees colder.

Graph from Weatherunderground.com.  The ice caught on the 18th or 19th with a few to many new-ice holes. Most of the ice was type S2 (small gain size).  This was most likely related to falling snow seeding the primary ice although it was windy enough to generate lake frazil as well.  We skated on Russett pond on the 22nd on ice that ranged from 37 mm up to about 50 mm (2"). 

Montana Ice

Early Ice

Several people have have been sailing and skating in Northern Montana for the past week.  This picture is of John Eisenlohr was taken on Smith Lake in mid November. This is the same boat that John won the very competitive 5.6-Mini Class 2 with at the 2014 FISLY-NALSA World Championships.  That event was sailed on July at Smith Creek NV. 

Others have been skating on Lake Helena, on the duck ponds on Canyon Ferry and in southern Alberta. 

2015 Season

Pictures from Northern Sweden taken in mid October by Karel vanderVoort

Since the end of the last season a few articles have been published: 

• An article on the dramatic effect of booze on mortality of a relatively small number of snow machine riders was published in late May.
• Last April I was able to observe a large area of Lake Champlain going out over an afternoon.  The article on this is published in the 2014 blog
• A few days before that Doug Merill and I spent an hour falling through 14", type S2 ice that was in thaw stage 6.  This ice conditon accounts for a lot of late season wetness on the part of fishermen who believe that thick ice is strong enough for one more day on the ice. 

Winter Arrives.....in Lapland

Welcome to the 2015 ice season!

Dutch skater, Karel vander Voort, has just returned from a trip to northern Sweden to check out early season ice.  The following are a couple pictures of what we all are hoping for in a few weeks.