Friday, 7:30 AM. 17 degrees, falling 6 degrees in the past hour. Wind NW, strong. The sky is overcast but the barometer Is up, predicting sunny skies. Here comes the Arctic blast! This morning I am off to Wolfsong Adventures to go along a dog sledding experience.
Yesterday about 11:00 AM I asked Joan if she wanted to go to lunch. Since I am normally a cheapskate and don’t take her to lunch very often, she was elated. “Where?” The Bell Street Tavern.” “That’s on the Island?” she frowned. “Just a short ride across the ice road,” I said. “It’s open and safe, all the signs are down,” I lied. “Well…” So we got in the four-wheel drive Dodge pickup, and went to Hwy I (I don’t know if some wag designated it that in honor of the ice road, but I would have), which is Washington Avenue and goes down the hill to the ferry landing, and in the depths of winter continues right onto the ice. We bumped down the embankment and past the “Travel at Your Own Risk” sign, lined up with the row of cast-off Christmas trees stuck in the snow as road markers, and rattled out onto the three mile long frozen road. The photos are pretty self-explanatory; Travel At Your Own Risk, Speed Limit 15MPH, Slow Down, etc. Pickup trucks and ice fishing tents were here and there; closer to shore for brown trout, further out for lake trout. The road is plowed very wide, and not very close to the line of marker trees, and with everything white and some fog one had to keep eyes on the plowed edge to stay on the road. The surface is pretty smooth at present, but can get very rough at times, and sometimes is filled with slush. I would not care to drive it at night, or in a blizzard, as I think I could easily get disoriented and wander off into the frozen vastness. If one had a GPS it might come in handy. The driving is slow and the trip across takes a while. The rescue wind sled waiting patiently at the Island end of the road sort of puts things into perspective.
We had a great lunch and toured the Island a bit before heading back. On the east side of the Island the lake is frozen as far out as the eye can see, but it looks unsafe and no one was out there. We did see deer, which leads me to conclude that the wolf packs have not come across on the ice road as yet. Anyway we had a nice diversion on a rather ordinary winter day, and one that probably can’t be easily duplicated. Just because our trip today was calm and uneventful, don’t get the idea that this can’t be a real adventure, or even an undertaking fraught with danger. The first winter we went across the ice road, it was March, and we were advised to put our convertible top down, as that was how one recent traveler had escaped unscathed. Then there is the story of the construction company that decided to move a house across on the ice. It went through, and bobbed about until spring, when a fishing tug put a line on it and towed it to shore. Then there was the Japanese tourist couple a few years ago that were insistent they would take their rented Mercedes across the rotting ice as an adventure they could remember for a lifetime. It went through, they escaped with their lives and being Japanese took a lot of pictures, and I am sure they are talking about it yet. The car was retrieved quickly as it was not far off shore in only eighteen feet of water. It started up right away. The German’s make good stuff. Remember though, as you drive across, that the channel is 180 feet deep in the middle. Last year I saw a pickup go through, but it got stuck going down and froze in over night. It took a long time to chop it out and haul it in.
A couple of years ago our neighbor Sherman, who is a rescue diver, got a call that a pickup had gone through and there might be people down inside. He got out there and into his gear, and looked down. "Any chance they'd be alive?" "Nope." Sherman, who is no dummy, told them to grapple it and pull it up, he wasn't going to swim down there. Looking down into the clear cold water they could read the license plate, it was looked up and the owner was some guy in Red Cliff. They called the owner's phone number, assuming they would have to explain to someone that he was probably dead. Instead they got a groggy voice that admitted to being the owner of the pickup. It seems he and another guy had closed up the tavern on the Island the night before, got onto the ice road and decided to take a shortcut. They managed to get out as the truck went down, clawed their way onto the ice and, being well fortified with antifreeze walked home by dead reckoning and went to bed. There are also stories that are not humorous, as when snowmobiles have gone in with loss of life, but they usually have nothing to do with the ice road itself. Generally speaking the dangerous conditions are in the late winter when the ice is weakening and being moved about by wind and current. Right now, nothing can go wrong. Go wrong. Go wrong. Go wrong.
I wrote this account especially for some friends of our daughter Greta’s, all of whom live in Ohio and are regular Bayfield Almanac readers and have assumed the ice road was just some sort of tall story told in northern Wisconsin gin mills. Read and believe, you doubting Buckeyes!
Go Badgers!
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