Winter Games Ice Should Be Pretty Good, But Officials Say There Are Still Plenty Of Places To Avoid
Winter Games Ice Should Be Pretty Good, But Officials Say There Are Still Plenty Of Places To Avoid
January 26, 2022Steve Schwaller
(Arnolds Park)– Winter Games this weekend will bring a lot of people out onto the ice of the Iowa Great Lakes. Mike Hawkins of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources says for the most part, the ice is in pretty good shape thanks to the recent cold weather. However, he says there are still the usual trouble spots with heaves and seams…
“For example from Pillsbury Point to Fort Dodge there’s traditionally a large heave that forms right there, and that one, you know, has been the point of, a place where folks have gone in before…vehicles and ATV’s, UTV’s, snowmobiles. That one’s a dangerous one and one to look out for. Some of the other ones that maybe are there most years aren’t, and then we’ve had a couple that have shown up in places where we traditionally wouldn’t see a heave. There’s one that kind of runs the shoreline from the Kum ‘n Go boat ramp on East Lake Okoboji from the park there and the boat ramp, down towards Mau Marine, and that one’s actually not very visible right now.”
Hawkins says there are also some scattered areas of thinner ice where geese had been keeping some open water up until just recently…
“The danger there of course is what looks like ice was probably just recently formed and so those areas where the geese are I would stay way away from those areas. Give those areas a wide swath around.”
Hawkins says another good area to avoid is bridges.
He offers some additional advice for winter games that we’ll pass along in upcoming newscasts.
