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Great Lakes ice coverage - Winter 2026

Lakes freezing over are one thing. When I see the Snake River freezing over, I know winter is really here. No winter for us this year.
Sometimes the St Joseph freezes, sometimes not. When it freezes it's safe for coyotes at best and even they usually stay near shore. The thing I love about the St Joe in winter is that if it freezes it is always fighting hard to open back up. Pics show the river 2 days ago still covered in ice/snow (behind the big mice) then yesterday, our first day well above freezing in a long time. 👍

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The most spectacular water freeze I've ever seen was from an airplane in the mid-1980s. I took off from Albany, NY, airport to get a connecting flight in Chicago. The pilot deliberately flew low over Niagara Falls and even dipped his wings so we could see it better. The whole thing was frozen. Actually, there likely was water flowing under the ice, but the spectacular frozen surface gave the appearance of a gigantic ice sculpture.

Evidently, Niagara Falls is currently more frozen over than it has been in more than a decade. So much so that the Canadian town of Niagara Falls and the Niagara Parks Commission are offering prizes of up to $5,000 CAD for the best photos or videos of the frozen falls.


 
When I was in the Air Force as a KC-135 tanker air refueling navigator, on one of our missions out of Eielson AFB, I was chosen as lead navigator of a winter flight of six other tankers leading as many RC-135 reconnaissance intelligence gathering aircraft. I felt a great responsibility to accurately stay on track to complete our mission and to return home again without error. Leaving Point Barrow, heading toward the North Pole and beyond, Celestial navigation was the primary external navigation resource, after precision dead reckoning, as always, of course.

I had learned that I could plot and draw the sharp ice ridges on my chart, visible on my nav radar that it could see on the dark winter surface of the Arctic Ocean. After their final refueling top off, the RC's dropped off to continue their mission circumnavigating around the Arctic Circle as I turned the tanker flight around to return navigate all to home base near Fairbanks.

Those mapped ice ridges I had previously drawn proved to be very valuable to confirm that I was on our return route until the confirming radar return from the oil field pile of steel pipes at barrow brightly painted on my radar a few hundred miles later.
 
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