The Shores of Lake Huron - 2008/03/23


Since most businesses use Easter as an excuse to be lazy, all of my regular hang outs were closed. Rather than sit around at home being bored, I decided to drive on out to the Lake Huron shoreline and see what effect spring was having on the ice. I took I-69 east into Port Huron, had breakfast at Big Boy and then headed North up M-25 to some of the parks along the shore. The picnic area of Lakeport State Park was closed off, so I headed a little bit more north to the camping area. It was closed too, but I decided to just hop the gate and go exploring.


This is the shore at the North half of Lakeport State Park. It's still very icy even this late in the year.

Looking north up the shore.

And looking south. You can just make out where Michigan and Ontario meet.

After the big piles of snow on the edge there was ice as far as the eye can see. It looks as though the waves were instantly frozen in place.


 

This is a more detailed shot of how the ice all clumps up in mounds right at the edge of the lake. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's really interesting.

I wanted to walk out on the ice. It looked thick enough to support my weight, but looks can be deceiving. A lot of the ice had large hallow sections of thaw.

I wouldn't want to fall into this. If you held still you could actually hear the ice slowly settling and melting away.

For some reason the many mounds of snow seemed to form volcano-style indents where the ice would melt through. I wonder why this occurs.


 

Sideways growing trees.

This is about as far as I felt safe going out. My coat is awesome!

Only a few miles north the ice only goes out about a hundred feet before being completely melted.

Between Lakeport and Lexington you can get all your Catholic power tool needs. I didn't even know they made religious power tools.


 

Over all I only spent about two hours on the shore in various parks, but I drove close to 200 miles. It was worth it though. I'd never seen the Great Lakes frozen like this before, and it was really cool, even a little spooky.

Life