Ice Out!

Well, I almost won. I was just 30 or so hours off from predicting when the ice would entirely melt off the lake. Maybe I’ve learned after a year here to give good predictions. More likely, I just got lucky.

One of the most fascinating things I have learned here in Minnesota is that the Great Mississippi actually does freeze. It freezes enough to snowmobile on it. But what is most amazing (or crazy) is that just below a dam in the town of Sartell where it starts freezing again (and that’s within a quarter mile), people ice fish on it. There is open water not ten feet from them, and yet there they sit in their little huts fishing away. Courage? Or foolhardy? Not sure which.

To me, watching the Mississippi freeze is more interesting than watching a lake freeze. Lakes freeze evenly from the edges to the middle, the ice getting thicker and thicker below (like two feet thick!). But watching the ice go out on a lake is more interesting than watching the Mississippi un-freeze. When the Mississippi thaws, the water begins running high and strong. The ice breaks up and floats away. You don’t really see it. But a lake you can watch. It starts on the edges. Then it begins to look like the ice is soft, just floating on top of water. But, it’s not. Throw a good size rock out there and it will skid across without breaking through. Those huge chunks of ice begin breaking apart one day. And then they get lighter. That’s when they start to move.

For ice to go out, it’s needs warmer days, some rain and wind. Wind is probably the most important aspect and it makes the lake turn into a world that changes every other minute. To me, it looks like a huge, interactive map. The darker areas are the land, with rivers of water running through. And it changes every few minutes. The land shifts. The rivers run a different course, disappear completely or shift in size. The wind is shifting the large patches of ice all around. On the lake at camp, it’s a good eastward wind that will finally blow the ice out. We got one of those on Saturday. At first, the map shifted this way or that. Then the wind picked up, pushing the large flows of ice east. You could watch them flow across the lake. Within twelve hours, they were gone – melted away or broken up on shore. The water rose, the wind raced across it forming whitecaps. And the ice was out.

God’s creation is truly amazing. I don’t know if I’ll ever live somewhere again where I can watch a great river freeze or a five-acre lake “ice out”. But I am so grateful I have gotten to see something that incredible.