Ice off -- ice on

I know the locals got all excited when on March 29, 2010, during the night of the big wind storm, the ice started to break-up. Then after three days of wind there was hardly any ice left on the north end of Bowron Lake. Many were touting the earliest Bowron Lake ice-off date in history!! BUT... despite the clear blue waves on the lake... it is not offically ice-off yet!











If you read the IceWatch Canada website, offical ice off is when a lake reaches the B4 stage --'completely ice free'. Although Bowron Lake 'looks' ice free when you gaze at it from the north shores... there is still a large free floating ice floe hiding around the point in the bay at the south end. Therefore Bowron Lake is at this date, April 15th, 2010, still considered at the B3 stage... 'ice in movement'. This is the first year that I know of (during my record taking years) that this has happened. Usually at break-up all the ice moves north with the currents and winds, ending up in the northern bays before clogging the river. This little ice floe, approx. 70 acres in size, seems to have hooked itself behind the point and is 'stuck' in the south bay of Bowron Lake.


All pictures taken on April 14, 2010. This picture is of the mountains around the back side of the ice floe.

Yesterday (April 14), Dick and I took the motor boat out to get pictures of it. As we motored by, the edges of the ice undulated with the wake of the boat, but didn't really break up. It only broke up when we tried to 'cut' the boat through a narrow section of the floe. We found the ice to be about 3 to 4 inches thick. On April 13, the ice floe closed in behind some local fisherman who had gone around it to the far end of the lake, and they reported having to get up onto the floe and drag their 12 ft aluminum over a section of the floe to get out. We didn't try this... I'm not that anxious to test the ice!

For the record -- the earliest ice-off date I've recorded occured on April 2, 1992, when over night, a big wind storm took all the lake ice and jammed it solid into the river. Before that, in 1941, the recorded 'opened' date is entered as April 5th. Being that I wasn't here during that year (ha, ha)... I don't know if 'opened' is an offical ice-off term or if they experienced conditions like we are having today.