I woke up this morning to the first snow this fall on Clary Lake, and a short power outage, offering me an opportunity to test my generator (it worked fine). It sure looks like winter out there, but it’s pretty warm out. I expect this 2+” of new snow will not last. The lake is still open but there has been ice in the coves off and on this past week so it’s clearly getting ready. We’re just waiting for some sustained cold weather for it to freeze up once and for all. It’s going down into the low teens for a few days this week so there’s a good chance the lake will skim over if it remains calm overnight, but I think a solid freeze up is still a few weeks off. Now is the time to think about getting your skates sharpened and the ice boat ready! When there is ice suitable for skating or ice boating, you best be ready to go because it usually doesn’t last long before snow makes an appearance.

For ice skating you really want smooth ice, but you can ice boat on almost any ice, even with a little snow on it as this video I made a couple of years ago will attest:

There are more ice boating and ice skating videos on my Youtube Channel.

We’ve been keeping track of when the lake freezes over and opens up since 2001. Twenty two years really is not a long time to expect climate trends to show up, but as you can see from the slopes on the trend lines on the chart below, it really does appear as though ice-in is occurring just a little bit later every fall (the red line is rising) and ice out is occurring on average just a little bit earlier each spring (the blue line falling). However, the number of ice-free days is clearly on the increase (yellow line distinctly rising) because later ice-in and earlier ice-out dates both increase the number of ice-free days- it’s being stretched from both ends:

You’ll find the above chart and the rest of the data on our Ice-In and Ice-out dates for Clary Lake.