I’m calling Ice In today, December 22, 2022. I drove around the lake earlier checking the ice from various locations with binoculars looking for open water and I couldn’t find any. And that’s that, as my friend Ernest would say. It remains to be seen whether the ice survives the warm weather, heavy rain, and high wind forecast for tomorrow. Time will tell.

Today is day 355 of the year which is a little later than the average of 348 for ice-in, and there were 268 ice-free days in 2022; average is 252 ice-free days. We really don’t have data going back far enough to be able to see any long-term trends.

The lake was *almost* frozen over back on the 13th but there were still a few patches of open water to be found. David Hodsdon did some research into definitions of ice-in and he came up with “Ice-in is when the lake is completely covered with ice for it least one day and night and remains at least partially (say 50%) covered from then on.“