Center for Limnology
A. Hinterthuer
“Today, I woke up at my favorite place on earth – Ten Mile Lake, in Hackensack, Minnesota. On the coldest day of the winter thus far, the frozen lake is so bright, so sparkly, it is almost hard to look at. And when you are from a place where 30 below is often the actual temperature (NOT the wind chill), you rely less on the calendar to define the seasons and more on observations of specific events that are tied to the climate.
Summer, to me, never began on the day with the most sunlight, but rather on the day the dock was installed (and ended, of course, when the dock was removed). Winter and spring were always announced by the day the lake froze and thawed.
Then I moved to the relatively tropical city of Madison, where the winter is shorter, but the lakes still provide a checkpoint in our urban phenology. But now my observations are set up as a study of contrasts: my asparagus came up two weeks sooner than my mom’s or simply subtract 10 degrees from Madison’s temperature to guess Hackensack’s temperature. On December 15th this year, I texted my mom: “Is Ten Mile frozen?” “Almost”, she responded. We have this conversation every year, but this year it felt different...”
