The Ice

January 28, 2008

What an awesome day! Bill and I spent the day with David and CC White, our New Hampshire homesteading friends, and a small crowd of hard-working people on Squam Lake for the annual Rockywold- Deep Haven ice cutting event. For over one hundred years, this family camp on the shores of the lake has been cutting thousands of blocks of ice from the cove and packing it away in ice houses to use for refrigeration during their busy summer season. It’s probably the longest-running ice harvest in the Northeast, and Norman Lyford has been running it for the last 63 years. He’s a taciturn guy – I asked him what changes he’s seen over the years. He paused for awhile and said, “Not much really, except we used to use hosses”. That would be “horses” to the rest of us.

The ice was pretty good this year – 14 inches thick, about half was black ice and half snow ice. This is just the right thickness, since they can’t cut it if it’s more than 16 inches thick since that’s the diameter of the saw they have, rigged up on something that looks sort of like a snowblower. It’s a carefully executed process of plowing the frozen cove, cutting a channel that will connect the ice fields to a loading ramp, then scoring the field with the ice cutter so it will produce about 280 blocks of ice 20”x20”x14” each, at a time. It’s like watching a giant checkerboard get laid out on the lake. It’s really a precision process so that no body or equipment falls in the icy water. After everything’s scored, Norm and the front guys work row by row to break the last inch of ice free with their pokers, then it gets herded along down the channel toward the loading ramp. It was fun to prod the bobbing blocks of ice, sort of like herding sheep and lining them up. Then, 5 at a time, the loaders used a motorized winch to pull them up into the beds of waiting pick up trucks, which take them to the ice houses to get stacked and packed with sawdust. There they’ll sit till summer. Rockywold used to use them for all their refrigeration but now it’s more of a nostalgic touch – a block of ice is brought to each cabin once a week to keep drinks colds.

But David and CC hauled about 150 blocks to their ice house in Sandwich which they’ll use for an entire year’s worth of refrigeration. The ice, along with their new solar-powered, high efficiency freezers, provides all the cooling they need.

Very cool.

MP