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| Ice fishermen on Lake Champlain near South Hero, Vermont several years ago. Warming winters are making Vermont lakes increasingly dangerous and messing with traditions that date back centuries. |
Lake Morey is, or at least was, the type of lake that always froze over by sometimes in late December or early January. It's not that big, and it's location north of White River Junction assured plenty of cold enough weather to ice Lake Morey over pretty efficiently.
Not this year.
The Washington Post sets the scene:
"Far out in the middle of the lake, Mark Avery could still see dark ripples of open water. Nearer to shore, the ice was about three inches thick. He prayed it would hold him and a snowblower
It was January 26. Each day that month, Avery had watched in disbelief as Lake Morey failed to freeze over. His family had owned the resort on the lake's southern shore since 1972. When he was a kid, early ice was a constant. 'Death and taxes and frozen ice by early January' as he put it."
Such a warm winter seriously disrupting a winter resort in rural Vermont is terrible. Even worse are the three deaths so far this winter in Vermont from ice fishing enthusiasts caught on weirdly thin ice.
Despite some cold weather that just came in late this week, we can mostly put a fork in ice fishing and pond skating season. Normal temperatures have begun their inexorable rise into spring. The sun angle is increasing, encouraging ice melt even if the temperature in the shade is below freezing.
Even if March proves to be on the cold side, I imagine lake ice, especially on Lake Champlain, will remain unsafe.
I'm sure most ice fishing fans can grudgingly take one bad season, but the chances that the ice will be unsafe in any given winter is increasing
At least as measured in Burlington, this winter was the third warmest on record. That means all of the top five warmest winters have been since 2002. There's definitely a trend here.
According to the Lake Champlain Committee, indigenous people centuries ago fished on ice, creating wind blocks from evergreen branches.
The Committee predicts that for perhaps the next decade or perhaps two, Lake Champlain will only freeze over on average once every four years. By 2050 and after, it would be down to one in ten years.
For whatever reason, New England is warming faster than almost every other part of United States and winters are warming up twice as fast as the other seasons.
That continues a decades long trend toward less ice on Lake Champlain, and other bodies of water in Vermont for that matter.
I was struck by the fact that the three ice fisher deaths on Lake Champlain this winter involved rather elderly men. The ages of the three who died were 62, 71 and 88.
Old habits don't go away so easily. I don't want to read too much into this, but I wonder if, after decades of "knowing" the ice was safe by mid-winter, the three men couldn't quite fathom that the ice was now dangerous.
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| Ice fishermen call it a day on a cold late afternoon on Lake Champlain near South Hero several years ago, Warming winters brought on by climate change are making scenes like this less frequent. |
I'm not blaming the victims, for sure. It's hard to get your head around the fact that something that's been the same all your life for many decades no longer is.
Back at Lake Morey, the Washington Post tells us some of the desperate, perhaps dangerous lengths Avery went toward salvaging his resort's ice fishing season:
"By late January, he faced a choice. The ice was still too thin to support the heavier equipment the hotel had always used to clear the skating trail. But if Avery didn't get out and care a path through the layer of snow, the trail - already weeks late - might not happen at all.
So Avery stepped onto the surface, pushing a garden-variety snowblower, the kind you'd use on your driveway. He listened hard for cracking noises and tensed to run. He had a pair of ice picks draped around his neck in case he fell in."
Other Vermonters who don't have a great a stake in the health of winter lake ice have mixed views on these warm winters. Myself included.
Sure, I don't like shivering in subzero morning after below zero morning. Above freezing afternoons are much more pleasant to deal with. I also don't like paying the heating bill from harsh winters. On the other hand, it just feels weird and disconcerting to walk across my snow-free, unfrozen and still kind of green lawn in January.
Such warm winter mess with everything from wildlife to the Vermont economy, as Mark Avery knows all too well.
The ski industry is Vermont's big money maker these days, but ice fishing is a much longer standing Green Mountain State tradition.
The big ski resorts can buffer the effects of climate change with their expensive snow making machines, made ever more elaborate and effective seemingly every year.
It's the small scale stuff, like local cross country ski trails, or the Lake Morey ice skating trails. The ice trails there finally opened in early February, after a two-day deep freeze, but subsequent thaws often made the skating poor.
Avery thinks the traditional skating season on the lake, which lasted on average seven weeks, will soon be half that. As it already is this odd winter.
He's adding things like concerts to the hotel on the lake, to draw or keep people who can't skate because it's too warm.
The quick subzero cold wave on February 3 and 4, which really lasted less than two days, reminded Avery - and me - of the old days when winter actually stung. When I lived in a place that, at least in the winter, the air made my face hurt, as the social media meme tells us.
As we go forward, we will have fewer and fewer of those flashbacks to the Arctic winters of yore. Which means the economic and societal traditions of a Vermont winter will also continue to fade.
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