Posts Tagged ‘ice out’
Ice Outed
The persistent puddle that I light-heartedly refer to as “Paddock Lake” is ice-free this morning. I’m afraid that judges were unable to conclude whether the ice-out date was March 6 or March 7 due to the dangerous lightning conditions last night, keeping intelligent people indoors during the thunderstorm that rolled through.
At 11:21 a.m. yesterday, it looked like this:
I found Swings and Light soaking wet when I came out, so I gave the puddle a closer inspection and discovered evidence that they had been playing their splashing game. Surprisingly, they hadn’t destroyed all the ice.
By 4:35 p.m., it looked like this:
The silt the horses had stirred up had yet to settle out, but it was an overcast day, leaving plenty of ice still visible.
I don’t know how much rain fell with the storm that arrived around 10:30 p.m., but it was audible on the roof and left things wet this morning. By the time I dragged myself out of bed to walk Asher, light snow was beginning to fall.
At 7:31 a.m., this is what I found:
While we were down at the barn, the snow got so heavy that we received an inch in less than half an hour.
The ice is gone, but now snow is covering everything again. It won’t last long. The forecast indicates we could reach 60°F tomorrow. Spring-like weather around these parts.
Anyone want to guess when we will lose another tree due to violent weather? Michigan sure got a gut punch yesterday with the surprisingly early tornado this far north. The storm chasers had their eyes on Texas and Oklahoma.
It gives me an uneasy feeling about the odds of increasingly intense storms unleashing damage to our paradise.
Every day that we escape negative impacts is a blessing to be celebrated. The quick March snowstorm this morning was rather adorable.
.
.
Guess Contest
Despite what the two words, “ice” and “out,” have come to mean in 2026 with respect to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, used together, these words have long had a different connotation in places where winter resembles Arctic conditions that last for many months.
For many lake communities, the question of when a lake will become ice-free has launched a time-honored tradition of friendly wagers on predicting the exact date. Thus, I have decided to open a contest for you, my dear readers, to guess the exact date of ice-out on Paddock Lake in 2026.
This photo shows the ice’s condition as of yesterday morning. It was frozen solid. Mia was already making close observations toward settling on her best guess. You will have to rely on what you can deduce from the image.
Here are the Contest Rules, as determined by a committee consisting entirely of unbiased representatives of Wintervale Ranch. In other words, me:
- Your guess must be submitted in whatever way works best for you and your level of connection with blogger, *this* John W. Hays. That may include an email, a text, a comment on today’s post, or telepathy, if you think I can be trusted to receive it. Don’t count on that.
- Comments on this post should include your initials, nickname, or some unique identifier of your choosing since unfamiliar commenters show up to me as “anonymous.”
- To be as fair as possible (and as a reward to contestants who are regular daily readers), your guess should arrive to me before the end of the day today, March 3rd. If you only miss by a small amount of time, go ahead and guess anyway. The judge may allow it in the case that nobody else has chosen to participate.
- In the event of a duplicate date being guessed, the first one to pick said date will be granted an advantage. However, there remains the possibility that I might split the prize if the situation seems warranted.
- Sour grapes are considered bad form, so if the horses choose to mess with the lake before ice out is declared by the judge, no complaints will be tolerated. Plus, such action by the paddock dwellers could possibly help some guesses. Did you consider that?
- Any rules that have been overlooked will be left to the whims of Mother Nature to ignore as she sees fit.
In the event that anyone actually bothers to guess, and if a guess of the exact date is successfully submitted, this contest is prepared to offer the following as a prize:
The winner will be awarded a custom word painting of vague length that may loosely resemble some manner of prose frequently referred to as a poem, ode, or rambling free verse creative writing that will somewhere within, somehow contain four words submitted by the person who guessed the correct date.
If a tie is deemed permissible, each person will be submitting two words to be combined in the victory verse composition.
The following context is being provided for consideration while deciding on your guess:
.
.
Icy Adventures
We don’t usually spend much time up at the lake when the ice is about to vanish from the water’s surface. I find it very entertaining. Temperatures dropped far enough below freezing Sunday night that water to the shore, which was liquid when we arrived, had refrozen solid by yesterday morning.
As the sun climbed to a mid-morning angle, the lake began making a percussive symphony of booming and cracking sounds in response.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There is an almost mystical energy unleashed by the intensity of natural forces pressing in multiple directions as the frozen surface reacts to wind, sun, gravity, the mixing of heat and cold, and the resistance of rocks and sand on the shore. When a fracture reverberates throughout the expanse of acres of ice, rumbling and echoing for almost a minute afterward, it can be felt in your physical core.
I notice my pulse speed up when it happens, and hear myself making sounds of appreciation that don’t actually form words.
The guys –brothers, Jedediah and Caleb– showed up to work on the rotting truss and were quickly introduced to Asher and some of Cyndie’s fresh-baked scones.
They installed extra (temporary) support to the deck and the bottom chord of the truss itself in preparation for assembling scaffolding for the job. After further analysis and some outside consultation, the decision was made to change to a “hammer truss” design for the replacement.
I’m looking forward to what they come up with. It should be easier to build and will eliminate at least one of the key points that was trapping water and triggering the rot. It will change the appearance of the front of the house and may take a little getting used to at first, but I am open to the possibility it may end up being more appealing in the end.
It will certainly open up overhead space on the deck and produce a more spacious feeling.
As the warm afternoon eliminated most of the new ice that had formed the night before, Cyndie and I let Asher have some fun along the shoreline.
He had a blast breaking ice and chewing some of the chunks. Falling into the water as sections of ice gave out beneath his weight didn’t seem to bother him one bit.
Icy cold doesn’t seem to startle him either.
It looked like so much fun, I needed to keep reminding myself I couldn’t step out to join him in the shoes I was wearing. That, and the fact that icy cold would absolutely make an impression on my feet.
.
.
Relative Something 