This is my Saturday sky reflected in the... ICE on the lake. Scary, huh? See those small dark object on the ice near shore? Matthew was skipping rocks on the ice. He says it's a lot easier than skipping them on water. Ah, the ingenuity of a teenager. The ice is about 3/4" thick, not safe to venture out on yet. The rule of thumb, known to all locals, is at least 1 inch of ice to support a person, 1 foot to support a vehicle. Yes, people drive on the lakes. Back in the northern Minnesota town where I went to high school, the city plowed a road across the frozen lake on the edge of town to make a shorter drive for the folks that lived on the other side. Cars and pickups go through the ice occasionally, but no one worries too much about it -- I guess it is viewed as thinning out the gene pool ;)
The good news in the above photo is that the pontoon boat and the dock are on the bank, not in the water. Every year it is a struggle to get a vehicle capable of pulling them from the water together with Smokey and a son on a day that isn't raining or windy and to get it all organized and done before the lake freezes. We are such optimists that we don't want to pull them if there is even the slightest chance that we'll get another day warm enough to go for a boat ride or to sit on the dock. In 1991 we got caught by the infamous Halloween blizzard, when Mother Nature dumped something like 2 feet of snow on us in less than 24 hours and followed it with near-zero (F) temperatures for the next few weeks. Poor Smokey had to extract the boat and dock from 6" of ice. We hope that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
