It is nearly 50 degrees this morning. Less than a week ago we awoke to snow on the ground and now it didn’t even cool off overnight. Yesterday morning the ice was so thick on the windshield that it was a real chore getting it scraped. And the forecast is for snow tomorrow. But today it is warm. That’s what the weather does here in the spring. It surprises you.

I needed to get outside to clear my head yesterday and so we took a quick drive and a short hike in the hills. The ice is beginning to recede in the reservoirs - it isn’t back far enough to put a kayak in the water yet, but it won’t be long. As soon as there is enough open water it is kind of fun to play with a plastic kayak in the lake. The kayak will slip up on the edges of the ice. If the ice is too thin and i break through, i can float. and I can paddle wherever I want because the open water tends to run along the shore enabling me to paddle around the lake while there is still too much ice to paddle across it. Of course the ice doesn’t hold a fixed position. The wind can blow it up against the shore moving the spaces where the open water exists. It’s good to have a plan “b” when paddling when there is ice in the lake. Plan “b” often means being willing to pull the boat out on the shore and walk across the land to get it back.

Canyon Lake, right in town has rapid creek running through it and is ice free, so even though it is a very small lake without too much to see as I paddle, it will be a good place to paddle until the lakes in the hills melt more of their ice.

Of course misjudging the ice is a kind of spectator sport around here. The fishermen who go out regularly have learned where the ice is still thick. We saw a few hearty fishermen on the ice yesterday. But it can turn into a risky business in the spring. I don’t ice fish and I don’t trust the ice. It makes me nervous to see them out there when there is open water around. They know the thickness of the ice because they have drilled through it to make their fishing holes. Still, they walked out on the ice to get to their fishing spot. And they have to walk back across the ice to get to land.

The fishermen who take a few weeks off from the sport are the ones who get caught by surprise. Most years there is an ice shack that takes the plunge. This year the sinking ice house is straight out from the north shore marina at Sheridan Lake. About half of the structure is still visible as it slowly sinks into the ice. It wont’ take too many 60 degree days for it to disappear beneath the surface. Then they have to wait for warmer conditions to launch a boat and get someone to dive down and hook a line onto the shack. Sometimes they can get it to come up in one piece. Sometimes it breaks up. Waiting for it to sink out of sight is the spectator sport part of the process.

Here is a strange thing that can happen with ice on the lake. Snow can actually speed up the process of melting. The spring snows that we are likely to get have lots of moisture in them and even though the precipitation falls as snow, it puts a layer of insulation on the ice of the lake and traps the heat from the warmer water below. This speeds the process of melting. As the snow melts from the sun above, a layer of slush forms on top of the ice and softens its surface. A spring snow like the one forecast for tomorrow can actually result in quicker breakup for the ice.

I’m no fool. I know that mid-March is too early for spring fever in the Dakotas. Our son was born on March 15. We were living in North Dakota at the time and I froze two different sets of tomatoes that spring by setting them out too early. Spring fever doesn’t usually result in quite that much craziness, but it rarely does much good, either. Still, for a dedicated boater, there can be some fun days of paddling and exploring even when you know that colder days are still possible. A Kayak is a warm place to sit. If you put a spray cover on the boat, your lower body naturally warms the pocket of air that surrounds you in the boat. Since heat rises, it naturally travels up the trunk of your body as you become a sort of natural chimney sitting in the boat. The upper part of your body is getting some good, gentle exercise. The motion of paddling with a double-bladed paddle is very similar to the natural motion of stretching after a nap.

And there is plenty to see on the lake all year around. I didn’t have time to check out the beaver lodges yesterday, but that is always a fun activity for the spring. We’re probably more than a month before this year’s pups are born and then we aren’t likely to see them until late May or early June. But if there are pups in any lodge there can be some fun activity almost as soon as the ice is gone from the water. The two-year-olds have to move out of their birth lodge in the spring. They are often a bit lost at first. Because there are beaver lodges in the creek upstream from Sheridan Lake, a few of the two-year-olds wander into and around the lake. They are probably a bit disoriented because they have just been driven from their lodge, and beavers aren’t too friendly to start with. I suppose my kayak looks strange from the bottom to a swimming beaver and it is twice as long as them, so it might seem like a threat.

This years if a beaver wanders out into the middle of the lake, there will be an ice fishing shack waiting for him on the bottom - not a good home for a mammal, but an interesting thing to explore all the same.

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