Posted on 01/06/2018 6:20:14 PM PST by nickcarraway
I recall it was a piece of cut birch sapling. Lots of saplings around. Cut em and used em whenever it was handy. Birch held up better than poplar. Oak wasn’t as easily available.
You have a Zamboni? :)
Just like ice road truckers
There is actually a lot of science to ice. To get an Alaska Professional Engineers License, one needs to pass a cold region special test. One of the topics is ice river/lake road requirements. Part of the test is determining the minimum ice thickness for a certain vehicle axial weight and speed.
Oh good God again tonite.
We are such cowards. Our whole society simultaneously complains about kids and people not getting out enough and having real exercise, while simultaneously shutting down all the natural play opportunities as “too risky”. Hence, no one sets up ice-skating venues outdoors on bodies of water anymore. And etc. with all kinds of great play options. Too unsafe!
A brother-in-law had a calf break thru the ice on his pond, and he tied a rope to a tractor and went out to save it. At least he must have thought he’d tied it securely . . .
About 16 years old...Friend and I walked out onto a frozen pond...I went first...Got out a ways and turned around and was talking to my friend...
I was interrupted by a weird cracking sound... I looked down and just exactly like on the cartoons, the ice under me turned into a spider web...I looked at my friend as he was then watching the ice...With a look of ‘this can’t be happening’ on his face we both watched as the cracked ice quickly spread to where he was standing, about 10 feet away...
Sploosh!!!
I beat him to shore...He say’s I swam over the top of him...I don’t know...It was surely a cold, cold, stiff walk home...
Harry.
You’re right.
I feel my shame deep up a dark place.
That is awesome, if I didn’t live in Miami I would do the same for my kids.
I had heard someone insist that a dog could sense the ice thickness on a river and would instinctively walk along the thickest ice. I didn't believe it, but nonetheless one winter day when I had been out hiking and decided to walk the frozen-over and lightly snow covered river (which I knew for a fact to be shallow in that stretch during a normal stage), a neighbor's dog - widely considered to be dumber than a hammer - came down to check me out and then proceeded to walk in front of me. As we got to where I was going to leave the river and enter the timber, the dog kept going downriver and the first step I took towards the bank put me through the ice up to my knees.
I cussed that canine and decided that the idea about a dog's sixth sense about ice was a crock, but I then reflected that maybe he knew the ice had been safe enough... for him. It was only about 100 yards to the house, but that was one miserable walk. I never trusted river ice again.
As long as you don’t fall through.
“My friend has a place on a lake in Northern Wisconsin. Usually by Christmas their ice is 10-12” thick. they can drive trucks on it.”
Just don’t walk where the spring feed is bubbling up.
Your dog might have been able to hear the river current. It would be louder where the ice was thinner.
Almost always people that fall through ice are absolutely clueless. On my lake someone loses a vehicle through the ice annually. Each one of them turns out to be an idiot.
“BTW — Ponds and Lakes are one thing, but rivers should not be trusted. If you fall through, the current can quickly take you away from the hole you made, and then you’re lost.”
Used to skate close to shore on Mississippi River in Dubuque Iowa. Bitch cold and deeply frozen. Could hear ice cracking from current a mile or two away. No problems for me but I know of two or three boy scouts who did’didn’t make it on one of those nights.
There was a thing you could buy to do that with hoses and water in your back yard. My little hockey player wanted us to do that when he saw it in a catalog. I had to explain to him that the pool of water would NOT simply freeze into ice overnight in Los Angeles.
When I grew up, near Chicago, people would make a frame in the yard from 2x4’s and fill it with water for kids to skate on.
That was pretty safe.
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