Frozen

Deep winter on the Great Lakes. In early 2024 I posted about the Great Lakes having very minimal ice coverage. It’s a different story this year! As of Monday, February 9th, all five Great Lakes are at their greatest percent ice coverage in several years according to NOAA, with Lake Erie more than 95% covered and Lake Superior above 50%, which is incredible considering its size and depth.

On Saturday morning February 7th, my younger daughter and I drove to Edgewater Beach in Cleveland to see Lake Erie. It was a bitterly cold day around 10 degrees, but I underestimated the wind by the lakeshore, which took the temperature down to around 15 or 20 below zero. It meant that we had to keep our visit pretty brief. I should have had her put on additional layers and we would have needed something to cover our faces further to last longer than we did. 

The sun was out and with the world covered in white, it was blindingly bright out. We pulled up near the pier and the first thing that we saw was a paraskier “sailing” about 30 years out from the shoreline. Beyond them as a reference point, there was an unencumbered flat, white expanse stretching northward toward Canada. The last time Lake Erie reached 100% ice coverage was in 1996, and it has only happened three times since record keeping started.

It may not reach 100% this year. Yesterday, news posted that on Sunday the 8th, wind dynamics created a massive crack in Lake Erie’s ice. The crack is about 80 miles long and 3 miles wide. It’s visible from satellite pictures and stretches diagonally across the lake from Canada towards the Ohio coast west of Cleveland. 

There is at least one person who took advantage of this very frozen winter on the Great Lakes. In January this year, an article posted in Cleveland Scene about Eric McKinney from Painesville, OH east of Cleveland. Mr. McKinney appears to be the first person to bike across all five ice covered-Great Lakes. He accomplished this in January, using NOAA maps to monitor the ice coverage and depth to bike routes that were safe. The final stage of his ride saw him riding along what is, during warmer months, a ferry route between Port Clinton, OH and Put-in-Bay, an island in Lake Erie.

Mr. McKinney described the landscape he witnessed on some of his ride as “otherworldly… it’s almost as if humans aren’t meant to be there.” Perhaps this is truly the case of the inland seas in a frozen winter, once again reminding us of the reality of our existence on this planet. A speck in time and place. Perhaps this could feel depressing, but for me it feels liberating. There is nothing more than the here and now.