Joe's Pond Ice Out Contest Underway In Vermont. Maybe Bet Early?

It was 70 degrees on April 15 last year and the block that
indicates when the Joe's Pond ice hadn't fallen through.
The official ice out came on April 17, 2023. Photo
from the Joe's Pond Association. 

 I'm not a gambling man, but I'm willing to give a little advice on the subject anyway.  

If you're entering the annual Vermont Joe's Pond Ice Out Contest, bet on an early date. 

Joe's Pond is a beautiful, rather high elevation body of water in West Danville, Vermont, up in the Northeast Kingdom. 

Every spring, it's the subject of a popular guessing game and gamble: When will the ice break on the pond?  Thousands of dollars are at stake. 

The ice out contest started in 1987 as friends wanted to bet on when the ice would dissolve on the pond. To make the bet work, they had to device an exacting system to tell when the ice broke.

We'll let the folks at Joe's Pond take the explanation from here:

"After considerable discussion, they settled on a simple, low-tech control system: They places a well-used electric clock on Homer Fitt's deck and tethered it to a cinder block wired to a wooden pallet placed 100 feet out on the ice. That was it. 

The clock was checked twice daily in the morning and evening. When the block went down the clock was disconnected stopping at the 'official' ice-out time. Whoever guessed closest to the date a time the clock stopped won the contest."

That old electric clock has since been replaced by a weather proof timepiece  the location where the block is placed on the ice has changed a little. But everything else has remained the same with the contest since its inception. 

The contest has gotten huge. In 1990, about 1,500 people entered. Nowadays, a good 12,000 people buy ice out tickets, which cost $1 apiece. Half the proceeds go to the winner and the other half goes to the Joe's Pond Association. The Association uses the money for water quality programs and for events around the pond. 

Meanwhile, the winner will take home about $5,000.

 As I've extensively documented, this has been a remarkably toasty winter, and has an excellent shot at becoming the warmest winter on record. Which means the ice has not gotten thick on Joe's Pond. Plus, we haven't had a huge amount of snow. 

Deep snow atop Joe's Pond ice would insulate it from the warming rays of the late winter and early spring sun. 

The earliest ice outs on Joe's Pond don't necessarily follow the very warmest winters.  Before this year, the warmest winter on record was 2015-16. The ice broke that spring at 5:04 p.m. April 12, 2016. That was definitely an earlier than average ice out, but not THE earliest.

Those honors go to 2010, when the ice broke at 2:46 p.m on April 5.  

The winter of 2010 was a rather mild winter. But what really broke the ice was weather in early spring and especially the opening few days of April.

At St. Johnsbury - the nearest major weather station to Joe's Pond - mid-March featured a week of consecutive days in the 50s and 60s, which got the spring thaw going in earnest. 

Then, on April 2-4, a record early season heat wave hit, with daily highs those days in St. Johnsbury at 77, 84 and 83.  

The second earliest ice out was on April 8, 2012. Again it was a warm winter, but what really made the ice go out early was a week long, unprecedented record heat wave from March 18 through 23 that brought temperatures into the upper 70s and low 80s. 

I think we can see some tell-tale signs of climate change in Joe's Pond ice out dates, even though records only go back to 1988.

In the past 23 years, since 2000, the ice has only broken up on or after May 1 just three times, the most recent being in 2018. In the dozen years before 2000, the ice waited until on or after May 1 to break up on five occasions - nearly half the time. 

The latest ice break up on Joe's Pond was at 1:19 p.m. May 6, 1992.

As noted, this year, I expect an early ice out on Joe's Pond.  Not only have we experienced a warm winter, but now the end of February and the early part of March look very torchy in Vermont .In other words, aside for a couple cold days thrown in, it appears at least part of March will bring near record temperatures and melting ice. 

There's no telling what happens later in March and whatever part of April the ice holds on Joe's Pond. But I virtually guarantee we won't wait until May to see ice out. 

Beyond telling you the ice out will be early, I'm going to shut up about the rest of my Joe's Pond theories for 2024. After all, I purchased Joe's Pond Ice Out tickets, too, and I don't want to share my strategy.