Walking on Devil’s Lake when it’s so cold you feel like a character in a Jack London story and your dog gets worried.
Devil’s Lake State Park is a nice place to have nearby. It’s a natural lake on top of a hill surrounded by rocky slopes and outcroppings. It is a terminal moraine, a place where a glacier stopped advancing and dropped materials that aren’t consistent with the features of the surrounding land.
What surrounds it is mostly farmland. There are some hills and rock formations elsewhere in the area, but natural lakes are few. Devil’s Lake is its own sort of thing.
The only problem I have with Devil’s Lake is that everybody knows how unique and nice it is. Consequently, it tends to be crowded. Bit is a little too friendly and hyperactive to conduct herself gracefully around large numbers of people. I am too introverted to appreciate a crowded space regardless of how nice it is. Above a certain headcount I only see the people.
Luckily we’ve found a loophole: if you visit Devil’s Lake at sunset (or later) when the temperature is significantly below zero, like -5°F or better, you tend to have the whole place to yourself. We’ve been doing it for years and I don’t think it has failed yet.
This year, while most of the winter has been snowless and dreary, we got one last snap of cold and snow just in time to head up to the lake and test our new snowshoes. The place was deserted and the snowshoes worked perfectly.
It’s only a fifteen minute drive from home but it feels like a different world. You follow a narrow, winding road up a hill, meeting not a single car, and upon arrival you find a silent lake with few if any people around. The hills are tall enough to block the light of the surrounding towns and the sounds of normal life going on a few miles in each direction around you. When the air is this cold, it might be too heavy to carry sound anyway. At least it feels that way.
You see the sunset, the stars, and the few lights of the park and the grandfathered cabins on the west shore of the lake. You hear snow crackling under your feet. You feel the cold. That’s about it. It sort of feels like walking through a remote fishing camp in Ontario.
Hopefully one of these years the snow and the cold will intersect with a meteor shower or the northern lights or something. That would be special.
At any rate, we got it done. It was peaceful and it was beautiful. It’ll probably turn out to be the only time we visit Devil’s Lake in 2025.
Now we’re ready for winter to be over.
