Open Water in January?

A lot of folks have been talking about how surprised they’ve been to see open water on Devil’s Lake State Park recently.  Should they be? Well, that’s the thing about perception, it doesn’t always tell the truth. And in this case, even the records don’t help much.

(BTW, that photo above was taken while I was out paddling in January of 2006 on Devil’s Lake!)

So, when it comes to the record, the lastest that the lake has frozen over in any season was in 2001-2002 where the lake didn’t freeze over until Jan 27, 2002, according to park records. But that’s not the whole story. Looking at the records before 2002 going back to 1941, the lake stayed open into January in the winters of 06/07, 03/04, 02/03, 01/02, 97/98, 94/95, 82/83, 79/80. Interestingly, before 1980 the lake nearly always froze over in December and sometimes even November! Well, except for one weird year; The winter of 1953/1954, which is one of only two years recorded where lake didn’t freeze over at all!  So that’s a different record all together, but not the only one. The winter of 2015/16 was the second time on record where the lake never froze over.

Once I started looking at more modern records I found that we’re missing data from the winters of 09/10, 11/12, 12/13 and 13/14.  Hard to say why that is, but the missing dates inspired me to go back through my photo archives and look for January photos of the lake and see what I could find out about recent years. What I found is that I personally have photos showing some open water in January for 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016 and of course this year, 2018. But what does that really tell me? It’s at this point where I realized that you have to be sure of what you know, and what you don’t.

You see, the problem is that the official records only record two data points, “Ice In” and “Ice Out” (Usually “ice out” is in April these days.), but they don’t tell us if the lake then rethawed or refroze again. So technically if the lake’s “Ice In” date was December 1st, the lake could have thawed and opened up again on December 15th and not froze again until February and we’d never know it given the way data is collected. So, you can’t easily draw any definitive conclusion about any given season, when you don’t know what happened between those two points. In the same way that my photos of open water in January, don’t tell us anything about when the lake first froze. Follow?

Another complication to past records is that the lake can look very frozen over when standing on the beach of the north shore, however, it could still be open in the middle. A few times over the years I’ve seen the lake reported as frozen over. Yet, while hiking on the bluff trails, I could look down and clearly see that this was not the case. So there is no way to be sure that the records are accurate in the first place which makes it even more tricky.

So what can we say? Well, it’s not uncommon, certainly since the mid-1990s for there to be open water on the lake in January. In fact, it’s been fairly common which tells us a lot more about our perceptions and how they can easily not jibe with reality. We know it’s late in winter, therefore, we’re surprised there is open water, even when we really shouldn’t be. I’m sure there is a lesson there somewhere!

Oh, and by the way, if you have ice-in, ice-out dates (I’m thinking an ice fisherman here!) for the seasons of 09/10, 11/12, 12/13 and 13/14 please pass them along! I’d love to fill in the gaps in the data.