We’ve had a bit of a roller-coaster ride here in the Great Lakes region as far as ice cover this year. For the vast majority of the 2020/21 winter season, the lakes remained largely open. Then a big cold burst hit us in Feb 2021, and ice started forming very fast. That gave blue ice peepers something to do, probably compounded by a very long year since the COVID pandemic started and people just wanting something to do safely.

NOAA published some interesting graphs of this strange season for ice cover. The Great Lakes overall seasonal ice cover was at just 10.65% on Feb 1 this year and peaked Feb 19 at 45.84%. Here is a graph of Lake Huron, which I visited this year in late February for some winter landscape photography.

You can see the rather steep rise and fall for this year compared to the long-term average. The Great Lakes typically have a variety of up and down years for ice cover, though it does appear like we’ve been pinging the minimum end in the last 20 years than maximums.

I remember back the maximum back in 2014 because many photographers took advantage of the ice bridges that formed in Lake Superior to visit ice caves on Grand Island. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to travel that so far back then but do have memories of the bitter cold. While I hope that there is that opportunity in the future again, I can’t say I look forward to the long, enduring deep freeze it usually takes to make it happen!

No matter how much the lakes get covered, however, there are always opportunities for new and interesting photographs as long as one is open to enduring some of the colder conditions that come along with it.