January 26, 2013

Water and ice — on spring-fed Lake Wingra.



This afternoon, dogless, Meade and I took a walk down to one of the other lakes.

14 comments:

kjbe said...

Those springs are beautiful to paddleboard back into in the summer. Don't get out too much like that, in the winter, though.

Richard Dolan said...

The twangy music created a flashback to the old Clint Eastwood westerns, where danger lurked around every corner and the hats were mostly dark shades of gray (certainly not white). The open water against the ice in your vid provides the same feel -- how close can the skaters get without getting onto thin ice and falling through? Enticing, that ice where it's just in the process of icing, but whatever beckons must be resisted. That's what the music is saying: be careful.

Ann Althouse said...

"The twangy music created a flashback to the old Clint Eastwood westerns, where danger lurked around every corner..."

Ha ha. The truth is there was something wrong with the audio track and I didn't want it to be a silent movie. I needed to pick from the uncopyrighted choices in iMovie.

Unknown said...

Lots of ice melting around here today. The January Chinook right on schedule.

chickelit said...

A nice coexistence of ice, dogs, and open water

edutcher said...

Be careful, Madame.

Glad to see you have better sense than those other people, but I take you've already started to see the warmer weather.

chickelit said...

I wonder how many hockey pucks get lost in that open water area.

Back in the day, my dad used to pull lots of junk and trash out of the Madison lakes underwater: mostly lost boat anchors, fishing lures, and bottles. He'd melt down the lead anchors and cast them into 3 and 4 lb weights for diving belts and sell them.

One of the bottles he found in Mendota (it's actually a ceramic flask) is stamped (in the clay):

Selzerwasser

Leonhardquelle
Brunnen = Verwaltung
Gross=Karben.Hessen


It's an old German mineral water flask. A quick Google search tells me that the springs are still producing water: link though the flask is undated. I have no clue how that bottle ended up on the bottom of Lake Mendota.

Chip Ahoy said...

Someone threw it.

chickelit said...

No shit

madAsHell said...

Dog-less??

I can't believe you'll be that way for long.

Anonymous said...

this hockey player is drooling at the open ice....

SteveBrooklineMA said...

How do you pronounce Wingra?

Ann Althouse said...

Wingra? WING gruh.

By the way, the open water isn't from warming air temps. It's the spring feeding in.

chickelit said...

By the way, the open water isn't from warming air temps. It's the spring feeding in.

It's like natural waste water effluent. I'll bet you could stand on the edge of the ice and peer down into the water. Why don't you have Meade try that with his strap-on camera? Make sure he has his ice hooks though. :)