Wild joy in skating on Wisconsin’s lakes, rivers
With precautions — and even better with special skates — you can fly over state’s beautiful frozen waterways
DEWEY – It’s about 8 a.m. and 34 degrees, and Rick bends down over the ice and hacks at it with a small hatchet.
A few blows and there’s water burbling up out of the hole. He uses marks he put on the ax’s head to measure the thickness of the ice. It’s about 3 inches, maybe a little less, he said. Not ideal, but good enough.
We’re all milling about on the edge of Little Eau Claire River, just east of Lake Dubay, on the northern edge of Portage County. It’s Dec. 10. We are Rick Zahn, a retired civil engineer from Stevens Point; Bill Fehrenbach, a semi-retired math teacher, also of Stevens Point; USA TODAY NETWORKWisconsin photographer Tork Mason; and me.
I organized this little foray for this story, which is about Nordic skating, also called adventure skating, also called wild skating. It’s just ice skating, outside, on natural, ungroomed bodies of ice.
Simple.
But, wow, it’s addicting.
So far this winter has been nearly ideal for wild skating. It’s been just cold enough to freeze layers of ice on many lakes, marshes and slow-moving rivers, and there hasn’t been any snow to speak of. Snow is the enemy of wild skaters, of course. It ruins the ice.
Snow covers up ice’s flaws. You can’t see how deep the ice is, or see flaws or hazards that might be poking through the surface, such as cracks or rocks. And when it’s deeper, snow crusts up and skating, well, it’s over. Get your skis out.
If you have outdoorsy skater friends from
“I was hooked. And the more I did it, the more I enjoyed it . ... You’re just, like, flying.”
Rick Zahn
northern Wisconsin or Minnesota, your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds are likely peppered with scenes of people gliding across gleaming frozen lakes. Making the rounds are scenes from Minocqua, the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and other lakes in northern areas.
You can wear any kind of skates you want for wild skating. But Rick, Bill and I are wearing specially designed Nordic skates. They are akin to speed skates, longer than figure or hockey skates. And they use cross-country ski boots and bindings, so they are comfortable and easy to get on and off. The length of the skates make them fast, efficient and allow the skater to better manage rougher ice. The downside is they aren’t as maneuverable as shorter skates, so they are best for skating in one direction over large swaths of open areas.
After Rick first tried the skates, “I was hooked,” he said. “And the more I did it, the more I enjoyed it . ... You’re just, like, flying.”
Like gliding through a kaleidoscope
I first started wild skating circa 1974 as an 8-year-old. I grew up in the town of Frankfurt east of Colby, and there was a small stream that ran behind our house. Mom used to tell me stories about how she went skating at Cherokee County Park, and she encouraged me to go down to the creek to skate. I remember her kicking me out of the house, and making me go down there, but that might be an exaggeration.
When I was a teenager, I put the skates aside for years until I moved to White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and started to work for a chain of weekly newspapers there. It’s not news that Minnesota is hockey mad, and skating is closely related to that. My friend and fellow reporter Mark Nicklawske had a keen eye for finding smooth wild ... er ... suburban ice.
One cold Thanksgiving season in the early 1990s, we skated around Silver Lake in North St. Paul for an hour or two before a cop came along and ordered us off the ice because it was unsafe. We didn’t put up an argument, although the legality of his order was questionable. Our feet were cold anyway.
Our marathon skate came a few years after that when we skated across White Bear Lake, the lake, from White Bear Lake, the city, to Mahtomedi, another city about 10 miles away via ice. Oh that was a grand adventure, although quite scary, what with ice shoves, strange otherworldly groans from the depths of the lake and very sore quads.
We had one more memorable wild skate together just a few years ago, on New Year’s Day, on Lake Wausau as the sun set behind Rib Mountain in spectacular hues of shimmering pinks, reds and oranges. It was like gliding through a kaleidoscope.
Then, in late winter of 2018, I saw a National Geographic video titled “Hear the Otherworldly Sounds of Skating on Thin Ice.” The video featured Swedish mathematician Marten Ajne gracefully gliding across a lake near Stockholm. The “otherworldly sounds” are the Star Wars-like pinging thin ice makes under stress, and they are mesmerizing.
what I want to do,” I thought to myself. I noticed that Ajne was wearing longer skates, and did some internet searching to find out more about them. A short time later I ordered a pair of Nordic skates from a store called The Nordic Skater in Newbury, New Hampshire.
Safety is paramount when skating waterways
Rick and I met through our mutual skating interest via Facebook last winter. We skated together on a small lake at Lost Creek Wetlands, just outside of Stevens Point. He was deeper into the Nordic skating rabbit hole than I was, and had tips about safety and good skating places in central Wisconsin.
We met again at Lost Creek, along with Bill, on Dec. 4. It was warm that day, and the ice was really thin, an inch or two.
I slowly crept along the edge, making sure that I was in very shallow water, less than foot deep. The ice cracked like spider webs under my blades. Nope. Not today. So we sat there and drank some coffee and ate some muffins and pumpkin pie.
“There will be plenty of winter,” Rick said.
Wild skating, of course, is nothing new. After I started posting on Facebook about my ice skating experiences, my wife’s aunt, Irene Stein, started commenting on my posts. She, my fatherin-law, Andrew Kolesar, a World War II Marine who died last spring, and their sister, used to skate on a frozen pond near their childhood home in New Jersey before the war.
Irene said they called thin ice “‘rubber ice,’ and if you’re skating on it, you had better skate fast as the ice crackled under you,” Irene said.
Rubber ice. I like that very much. But I need to say something about safety here. There are tips to mitigate the dangers at the end of this column, but really, no ice is safe ice. If you are unsure whether the ice will hold you, stay off it, or stay in very shallow areas.
Other people also commented about my post on the Lost Creek nonskate. People up north wrote about their experiences on ice in Lincoln and Langlade counties. The next day I drove north from Wausau and found smooth, safe ice on Larson Lake north of Merrill.
The ice there pinged and cracked as I skated about 3 miles on its perimeter. It gave me that Marten Ajne experience I crave, some sore legs and a deep yearning for more and more wild skating.
Pristine ice conditions allow for events
Dan Clausen is the ski pro at Minocqua Winter Park, a winter playground that features miles of Nordic skiing trails, a tubing hill and, yep, an ice skating pond. Clausen’s ski shop at Winter Park sells the special skates, and Clausen himself has been Nordic skating for years and years, probably about 40, he said.
Several years back he organized a skating race event on Lake Tomahawk. He thinks Nordic skating races and festivals could be akin to the American Birkebeiner cross-country ski races in the Hayward area. But good skating on natural bodies of water requires the right kind of weather patterns, and we all know how cooperative Wisconsin weather is when we’re planning activities.
This year Clausen thinks he can revive those old events. On Sunday, he organized an event he called the Pre Bob Pace Memorial Skate. Pace is Clausen’s late friend, a Minocqua-area outdoorsman who was out skating whenever the ice allowed. He also was a Nordic skier, kayaker and surfer. If conditions hold, Clausen plans on organizing a race/ marathon in the coming weeks.
The skating in the northern area of the state has been pristine so far this winter, Clausen said, and the men and women who love what the lakes have to offer have been getting out as much as they can, whenever they can.
They have an informal email chain set up, and they frequently call each other to report on ice conditions. Often, Clausen posts news on skating conditions, events and get-togethers on the ski shop’s Facebook page.
If you’re curious about skating or lake conditions, send him a message.
Joys and dangers of exploring nature
Bill, Rick and I are finishing up about an hour’s worth of skating on the Little Eau Claire River, and I’m changing out of my skates when Tork and Bill notice some movement on the shore. It’s a little white ermine, cute with black eyes, button nose and pointy ears.
In all my time knocking about the woods and lakes of Wisconsin, I’ve never seen one of these little guys before, and we’re all utterly charmed by its antics. Tork got some great photos of the little creature.
For a moment, skating transcended skating, it became about something more. It underscored that we’re all just part of nature, with all its quirks, dangers and joys.
And I am that much deeper into my
skating obsession.