5/8/08 – Here is the latest lake ice information from the Forest Service pilot:
ICE STATUS as of 1530, Thursday, May 8, 2008
ICE FREE:
Alpine
Banadad
Brant
Crocodile
Cross River to Long Island
Iron
Jap
Little Saganaga
Missing Link
Moon
Ogishkemuncie
Portage
Round
Sawbill
Tucker
Two Island
SOME ICE REMAINING
Alton
Cherokee
East Bearskin
Flour
Frost
Hungry Jack
Kimball
Little Trout
Meeds
Mink
Seagull (especially on western end)
Swan
FROZEN
Bearskin
Birch
Brule
Clearwater
Davis
Duncan
Elbow
Gabimichigami
Gaskin
Gillis
Greenwood
Kemo
Loon
Mayhew
McFarland
Musquash/Misquah
North Fowl
Pine
Poplar
Rose
Saganaga (quite frozen, according to the pilot)
South Fowl
Trout (east of Kimball Lake Campground)
Tuscarora
Winchell
The pilot feels that things will change quickly with the exception of the
eastern side of the Gunflint Trail (Clearwater, Greenwood, Duncan, Pine,
etc).
Judith A. MacCudden
Information Assistant
Gunflint Ranger District
Phone: (218) 387-3200
Fax: (218) 387-3246
email: jmaccudden@fs.fed.us

5/7/08 – The ice is out on Sawbill Lake! The official date is May 6th as the lake was essentially ice free by sunset last night. I will try to get out for a paddle this evening to check out Alton Lake. Usually, Alton, Cherokee and some of the larger lakes keep their ice for a few days after Sawbill goes out. – Bill

A small amount of residual ice is blown in by a stiff north wind. Most of Sawbill Lake is ice free.

Extremely high water brought this unexpected driftwood visitor to the canoe landing. Once the ice melts, it should migrate down to the mouth of Sawbill Creek.

5/6/08 – There has been good progress in ice melting over the last two days. The ice is now too degraded to even bother drilling a hole. It should go out on Sawbill today or tomorrow at the latest. Roy Wonder, our clueless Deputy of Outfitter Security, decided that the skim ice near the shore was plenty strong enough to hold a terrier. He piled in head first and took an impressively deep dive through the thin ice. He climbed out by himself and acted like it never happened. – Bill

Black ice on Sawbill. Today is warm and windy with thundershowers coming later in the day. This may be the end of the ice!

5/4/08 – After another chilly night last night, the lake ice measured 9 inches thick this morning. The sun is shining brightly and some of the smaller lakes are starting to look quite dark.
I went up to the end of the Gunflint Trail last night to play for a dance with my band, The Splinters. It was a celebration of the Gunflint Green-up, a community effort to recover both physically and psychically from last year’s gigantic Ham Lake forest fire. Four hundred volunteers planted more than 50,000 white pine and red pine seedlings. The weekend included a dinner, dance and the Ham Lake half marathon that traces the route of the fire for 13.1 miles along the Gunflint Trail. It was great to see a community celebrating their resiliency after a devastating disaster. It was also impressive that they had the energy to dance after planting trees all day. – Bill

I am warily drilling the daily test hole (notice my one foot in the canoe). It turned out to be plenty strong enough to stand on (9″), but I didn’t want a chilly surprise!

The official measurement.

Open water around the island.

Phoebe worries about the two humans that are literally walking on the thin ice.

5/3/08 – Eight inches of ice remains on Sawbill Lake. It rained all day yesterday followed by 2 inches of fresh snow overnight.
We tried to work inside yesterday, but the day before I saw a parade of wildlife on my daily run. First, a cow moose with her son, both looking pretty ratty as they shed their winter coats. The little bull was reluctant to yield the road, so I got quite close. His antlers are about 4 inch stubs. Just a bit further down the road I saw a sharp shinned hawk and moments later a ruffed grouse in full mating display. The hawk may have been looking to take advantage of the grouse’s bravado.
A mile or so further on, I spotted a fox hunting for mice in the dead grass alongside the road. The wind was blowing toward me and there was water running in a nearby ditch masking the sound of my footsteps. I stood 20 feet away and watched him forage through the grass. He was a beautiful cross-fox with a black belly and feet, a black triangle on his back that accented his black tail. His face was red and his body was mottled grey, red and black. Eventually he turned around, saw me, and was gone in a graceful flash.
Finishing out the wildlife extravaganza was a woodcock performing his spectacular high-flying mating flight.
Don’t let the pictures below scare you too much. As I write this in early afternoon, most of the snow has already melted. The forecast is for one more chilly day and then turning very warm and sunny. I still think the ice will be out by next weekend. – Bill

Just another typical spring-like morning at Sawbill.

This gives me a strong urge to wax my skis.

The snow covered twigs make a beautiful abstract pattern.

5/1/08 – Happy May Day! Today is statistically the mostly likely ice-out date for Sawbill Lake. That is not going to happen this year as the ice is still 10 inches thick and fairly solid. Since we started measuring a little less than two weeks ago, the ice has melted almost exactly an inch a day. If that average holds, the ice would be gone on May 11th. I think it will melt faster than that for a couple of reasons. The sun is a little higher, hotter and shines longer every day. Once the ice gets to 4 or 5 inches, it turns a very dark color which seems to cause it to melt very quickly. Accounting for these adjustments, my best guess is that the ice will depart on the 6th or 7th. It all depends on the weather though, so we’ll have to wait and see. – Bill

Deputy of Outfitter Security, Roy Wonder, eyeballs today’s official ice thickness reading. Roy says 10 inches.

Looking south from the canoe landing. There is quite a bit of open water. The first loon spotted at Sawbill this year is floating and waiting in this picture.

Looking north from the landing. Still pretty solid.

4/28/08 – Yesterday, Cindy heard a loon calling for the first time this year. On my run I saw a flicker, sharp-shinned hawk, a red wing blackbird, and a fox sparrow. The recent storm seems to have blown in the migrating birds. – Bill

Just to show that Lee doesn’t do all the work, I took my turn on the auger today. Although 13″ thick, the ice isn’t completely reliable anymore. Notice my wet left leg.

Today’s measurement. We didn’t get above freezing yesterday….

It doesn’t look promising for this weekend, but we’re still hoping that it will be gone before the opening of fishing on May 10th.

4/27/08 – Northern Minnesota is having trouble shaking winter this year. The latest storm dropped an inch of rain followed by 2.5″ of snow and a low temperature of 19 degrees. The standing water around the edges of the lake have refrozen and every tree is covered with snow. It doesn’t look good for ice out until next week sometime. – Bill

Lee drills yet another hole. I would have used a more original picture, but the camera battery went dead after one picture. The ice was 14.5″ thick today. The ice is floating at least a foot higher than it was three days ago and the streams are all in full flood.

4/23/08 – I missed measuring the ice for a couple of days. It is busy around Sawbill right now as we race to get the pre-season chores done. It was a beautiful 65 degrees and sunny here today, but the forecast is pretty dire. We are under a flood watch with 1 to 3 inches of rain expected tomorrow and the next day, followed by snow – possibly heavy – the following night. With the ground saturated, still mostly frozen, and no vegetation yet, the runoff could be epic. The streams around Sawbill are already nearly at flood level. Here at Sawbill, flooding doesn’t normally do much damage, except a few washouts in the road.
The eagles are back in force and I saw a beautiful red tailed hawk yesterday. – Bill

Lee pulls the auger out of a new hole. The ice “floated up” yesterday, which means that it has separated its connection with the shore and is now floating in a giant cake on the lake. Floating up is a major milestone, usually indicating ice-out in a week or two. We had to use the canoe to bridge across the ice near shore which is weak and covered with two feet of standing water.

15.5 inches of pretty dense ice still remains. It would bear the weight of a car, but I wouldn’t recommend driving on it.

Always fun to strand the unsuspecting out on the floating ice. I relented after taking the picture and sent the canoe back out to him.

4/20/08 – Real progress today. As I was drilling today’s test hole, two male merganser ducks lifted out of the small patch of open water down by Sawbill Creek and flew north. A sure sign of spring. I heard the first robin singing yesterday. – Bill

19″ with only an inch or two of slush. Ice is somewhat degraded through and through.

It is getting pretty sloppy in front of the canoe landing.

A pileated woodpecker has started working on a home in one of the big red pines in our canoe yard. It’s fun to see one of these large, primitive looking woodpeckers close-up, but it’s probably bad news for the pine. The woodpecker may have found some rot and is certainly weakening a tree that we don’t want to fall across a rack of Kevlar canoes!