Went out on the ice last week, Dec. 21st and drilled two holes. One at 50 yards... showed 4 inches of good, black ice and 2 inches of refrozen, slush ice, which is still fairly solid... just not as good an ice as we like to see. At 100 yards the good black ice decreased to 3 inches with the same 2 inch white ice topper. We didn't go any further, we like to see a good 5 inches of solid black ice before venturing out too far.
Now.... since then.... that is a different story. We have had two good snowfalls, some minus 16 degree Celsius weather and some 0 degree Celsius melts. Currently, and for the past two days the daytime highs have been a balmy minus 4*C.... and the fresh, fluffy, white, clean, snow on the lake is becoming patchy with large grey areas... not many mind you, but enough to take note of. We headed out yesterday and was stopped at 50 yards by one of these great, grey patches. Charley... the dog would not approach it.... he has a pretty good instinct about ice. Dick... minus the dogs good sense... got as close as he dared and dug with his boot to find the bottom ice. This ice was soft on top (he could easily scrape it with his boot), on top of that was a 4 inch layer of water and slush, then the wet grey snow that was visible to the naked eye.
Around this grey patch one could only see soft, fluffy, beautiful, white snow.... but digging underneath revealed the water and slush layer... so that tells us that there could be areas of water and bad ice hidden under the snow not visible to the unwary traveler. Needless to say we didn't go any further. Unfortunately we didn't drill the ice either so I can't report on how many inches there was.... I was just happy when Dick turned back to join Charley and I.
Harald, our happy European wanderer headed out on the Kibbee Lake trail yesterday. He reported a few dead fall trees over the trail, about 1 foot of snow overall on the trail and the tracks of a wanderer who had traveled before him. Still the snow was still very soft and tiring to slog through.
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