« Previous	Warm, Wind, and Snow Forts	Next »
	January 27th through February 2nd, 2025

It warmed up last week. High temperatures topped out above freezing and when they were below 32°F, we got a little snow.

The lake ice this year is strange. The light amount of snow has made it clear all the way through with air bubbles frozen at random in a 3D matrix. We don't recall seeing anything quite like it.

One of the first tasks of the week was to check the lake ice thickness. It took a while to drill the hole.

At the start of last week, the ice on the lake was 15 inches thick.

With the warmer air came a little snow and a lot of wind. Last Tuesday, gusts had snow devils dancing north on the lake all day.

The snow would deposit behind anything poking up above the ground. Some of the drifts were impressive.

So far this year, even with the drifts, there's not enough snow to cover what's left of last year's milkweed pods.

The north end turkeys seemed to enjoy the warmer temperatures and light snow.

Most sunsets last week were boring, but one splashed fire across the sky for a good 5 minutes.

And then it was time to build forts for the annual Lake Lucerne Bottle Rocket War. The opening ceremony was short and had an eaglely flyby.

The south's fort walls were started first.

A real tamper was added to knottlane's fort building tools. The resulting walls now have a uniformity that would shame a stack of Pringles.

A colder Saturday produced a mostly frictionless surface on the lake. Wall construction (and the wall construction crew) suffered greatly.

A small snow event late Saturday gave the lake surface the traction needed to resume a standard construction pace.

Safety tip: When tamping near the top, be careful not to catch the heavy tamper face on the far top edge of the form. If you do, the heavy handle will came back towards your head. That can result (and did, twice!) in the operator suffering a brief bout of Tourette's followed by a headache. Despite a few tamper based injuries and some DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) due to some fancy frictionless surface dancing, the men are in pretty good shape. If the wind is light and the contusion rate continues to remain low, next Saturday promises a good battle.<br><br><br>-Nemo needs a thicker hat.

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