Yesterday was a nice warm spring day with a sunny sky but there are a few Wisconsinites who like what the weather will be in a half year from now as they prefer the snow and cold, like this hardly soul enjoying a birthday today, who loved exploring the ice caves on the south shore of Lake Superior.
Enjoying the Ice Caves
Yesterday the ice layer on Lake Superior broke up and open water appeared again where I was standing for this picture so another sign that spring is coming and the rain last night took the last of my snow pile finally. But with chances of snow in the forecast, it might not be the last of the white stuff this spring yet.
Winter Fading
The sun set last night on the Lake Superior ice cave season as they closed last evening after only ten days due to the warming temperatures and predicted winds which will make the ice pack unstable. And while it might have been a short season for the ice caves, it has been a long winter so I don’t mind the warm up.
Sun Setting on the Season
By 8 am this morning, people have braved the cold temperatures and had hiked over two miles to see the ice caves which opened today after the ice pack was determined to be thick enough for visitors. In the summer, kayakers will paddle through the arch opening (when the waves aren’t not too high) but for a brief period during some winters, hikers can walk through the opening instead.
Winter Sea Arch
Surface ice had been forming again along the sea caves, but winds on the weekend blew the ice back out into Lake Superior so there is open (and mighty chilly) water where I stood just one year ago to take pictures of the icy formations. And because I was busy taking pictures of the ice caves, we didn’t get too far the first day (and didn’t reach the end of the caves after the second afternoon either).
Ice a Year Ago
A few stray snowflakes fell this morning so not enough new snow for ski lovers and even though there has been a few colder days, open water still exists in front of the ice caves on Lake Superior so no strolling by the frozen world this year yet.
Strolling by the Frozen Caves
The new month is starting out colder but it will take a string of cold days to create ice thick enough to walk on to view the ice caves like last year and to catch the golden glow of the setting sun.
A Golden Ice Cave
The warmer temperature the past week has felt nice after a cold December, but hardy winter lovers may not be as thrilled as the snow pack is shrinking. The ice layer on Lake Superior by the ice caves has also disappeared even though there was ice last week when the park rangers were out on the ice monitoring the thickness but last weekend’s winds blew and took the ice away. So now there is open water by the caves where last season 138,000 people walked on the ice to view the ice formations.
Admiring the Ice Formations
“Farming wasn’t going too well for three families…we could hold up a mirror and watch ourselves starve to death.” A statement from Florence Hokenson on why her husband and his two brothers started fishing for a living in the late 1920’s when at first the fishing only supplemented their diet but after several unsuccessful years of dairy farming they purchased pond nets and eventually pursued fishing full-time which they did for more than thirty years on Lake Superior.
The Herring Shed was a busy place during herring season where the wives, children, and hired hands awaited the arrival of the Hokenson brothers boat called the Twilite, loaded with fish in gill nets. The fish were untangled from the net, rinsed in the wooden tank, gutted and beheaded, rinsed again in the other tank, drip-dried on the rack, salted, and stacked in a barrel.
The Herring Shed
You sometimes hear the term ‘sands of time’, an English idiom relating the passage of time to the sand in an hourglass and that time is a finite commodity which is gradually running out.
The phase ‘Footprints on the sands of time’ was used in a poem called A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time
On a calm day, your footprints in the sand might last a while but on a stormy day, the next wave erases all evidence of your passage on the beach.
Sands of Time
