The Weekend On Ice

In December of 2018, we went on an “early season” ice fishing trip. While it wasn’t the most successful fishing trip, it had a big surprise for us which made it truly magical!

First of all, there was no snow! Our down jackets and winter boots seemed irrelevant. Sometimes you start with no snow and get some as you gain elevation, but we were only minutes away from our first destination and there was no sign of snow.

We got to the first lake and it was all ice! I had never seen an icy lake! Usually there’s a couple feet of snow, so you wouldn’t even be able to tell its a lake if it wasn’t for the set of trees around it.

The first lake lake was extremely slippery and we found it fun and challenging to walk and not fall! Roscoe was loving it…for the first half hour, he looked like he was ice skating on the lake with very little control of where he went! The slipperiness of the lake combined with the high wind on the first day, resulted in our chairs and fishing supplies to keep moving away and us having to “run” to get them and bring them back. On the way back, the wind really cooperated and carried all our chairs to the shore!

It felt risky and unsafe to step on the lake at first. We dug a hole near the shore to check the thickness of ice and it was well over the acceptable range. That didn’t make walking on it any less uncomfortable though! The lake was see through with lots of bubbles in different shapes and forms which I wasn’t able to fully capture in the photos. There were existing visible long cracks crossing one another and there were new ones that were made as we walked and those were scary. We tried not to get too close to any of the intersections as a group, as we could hear the cracking sound and see it expand every time we did. Another interesting sound was the sound of bursting bubbles! That one is a little hard to explain, it was scary at first but we got used to it.

The second lake was not as translucent, so we couldn’t tell what was happening underneath. It was less slippery and more calming and had a few interesting spots of its own! There were some interesting ice formations which looked both cool and creepy! There were some monstrous formations which would resemble lightnings or weird flowers or openings to the upside down world!

The third lake had a very thin sheet of snow on it which made it extremely slippery and perfect for ice skating! (which I tried with my boots…really wish I had skates on). The main feature of this lake was the icy snow textures on the surface, creating wave patterns!

For the night, we stopped at a creepy motel which seemed okay from outside but we ended up going to a different place for very valid reasons! First, I started getting worried that MM and a friend who went to ask about availability have been kidnapped as it took over half an hour and no signs of them anywhere! I went inside and couldn’t find anyone at the reception or through the windows of the restaurant. The motel was very old and had a weird layout and when I went upstairs hoping to find somebody there, I saw a long corridor with shoe matts outside and a bunch of really dirty boots thrown throughout the corridor! Two of the doors were open and it seemed like there were people talking! I went back to the car when a guy with a creepy smile came out of one of the rooms in his PJs and tank top. The boys showed up a bit later with a key to a room that was apparently big enough for all of us, so we went back in and tried the key a couple of times and finally got it to work, only to see a giant room filled with stored-up furniture that didn’t seem to have been used in a really long time and definitely not a place anyone could stay at.