Frozen Utah Lake Adventure

Whenever I have a three-day weekend, my immediate instinct is to go somewhere. Travel. Abscond. Get out.

However, the weekend of Martin Luther King Day is always a bit of a dud as far as travel is concerned (no disrespect to the holiday itself). It’s the middle of winter, and for a Utahan like myself, that means short trips are out—you will be cold unless you go pretty dang far—like Mexico. Or Hawaii. (These days it seems like you can get decent weather in southern Utah, but . . . there’s still going to be snow. And that’s just not cool.)

So this year, there was that usual pull to go somewhere melded with frustration because where, coupled with the knowledge that even if I wanted to go on a big trip, I wouldn’t because of COVID. Still wanting to do something, Bobby and I tossed our (my) beachy-warm dreams to the wind and went for the exact opposite: a frozen adventure out on Utah Lake.

For anyone who doesn’t know and might mistakenly refer to this lake as “the pristine Lake Utah,” it’s no such thing. The water is gross, it’s banked by smelly mud, and it’s infested with so many bugs that all the bug predators probably have summer homes there. In the winter, however, it freezes, and you can walk out on it and pretend you’re on the frozen tundra of Hoth. Or on Utah’s biggest ice rink. So that’s a bit of an improvement.

Bobby and I went at sunset. We didn’t want to pay the state park fee since we weren’t going to be using the park facilities, so rather than going out to the docks, we walked along the Provo River Trail out past the trailer camping area, then veered off into the weeds and out to the lake. It was all easy until we got close to the lake—and realized that there was a significant stretch of mud we had to cross. Not firm, packed mud, either. Nope, this was squishy, slimy, smells-like-poop mud. Thank heavens Bobby had chosen to wear his water-resistant old mission shoes instead of his sneakers with the holes.

So we squished across that as fast as we could, leaning into the wind. Our feet stayed dry, though our shoes were coated with mud. We were dressed to the teeth—coats and scarves and hats and gloves and wool socks. We passed a couple doing a photoshoot—I literally do not know how this girl was surviving the temperature in her flowing summer dress and bootie shoes, with no coat or other warm weather gear in sight. Wearing a dress in winter is basically like walking around in shorts, except, to paraphrase Bobby, “there’s a lot more air flow up in there.”

I was afraid, based on the mud, that we might also have to wade through water to get to the ice, but not so. The lake was frozen solid pretty much out to the edge, so no fears of it breaking. There were several large yellow circles and lines in the ice, where we assume plants were growing under the water (either that or a bunch of large dogs had a lot of fun). Those spots were also where the top layer of ice could actually be broken through to a slushy layer. I’m sure if there’s a botanist or a chemist or some other kind of -ist reading this, they could tell you the scientific reasons; I can’t.

We sort of skated our way out further onto the ice, being careful of places where the ice looked darker. We needn’t have worried—it was solid everywhere we tested. Here and there, we actually found places where we could see down a few inches, and it was all ice. We’d been told about frozen waves on the lake, so we hunted for those. And we found them! At least, I think we did. To us, what we found seemed like a graveyard for ice—a bunch of triangular ice slabs all butted up against each other, as if waves had become geometric. Some were 2–3 inches thick; some were so fragile that they broke if you brushed them.

Bobby and I also discovered that you could—are you ready for this?—play music on these slabs. Yes! Depending on their arrangements against other ice chunks, you could kick the edge and produce various tones, from a hollow-ish sound down to a bass-like boom. We tried to get a video of it for evidence, but alas, the music was muffled by the wind.

This was all fun, but it couldn’t last. The temperature change from okay to not okay happened quickly. One minute, I was cold but handling it; the next, the wind was cutting through me and I wanted the car and a hot bath and the feeling back in my fingers and toes. The sun was close to sinking at that point, and Bobby and I had wandered closer to the park’s docks during our ice exploration, so we climbed up to the dock and walked out that way rather than go back the way we’d come (we also weren’t mad to miss the return trip through the mud).

Hurry hurry hurry cold cold cold. We passed several groups of young people (how old does that make me sound?) on our speedwalk out. To distract ourselves from our freezing bodies, we criticized their clothing choices (large holes in the jeans, ankle pants, light jackets, etc.) and betted on how long they wouldn’t last in the weather. When we finally made it to our car, we tried (charitably, I think) to warn the kids getting out of the car next to ours that they might want something warmer than their thin jackets, but they just smiled, said thanks, and carried on. If they were really warm-blooded enough to not be bothered by the sub-freezing temperature, all I can say is I’m jealous. Me? I kept my ski coat on and turned the heater up as high as it would go for the drive home. And then snuggled into a warm bed. And then gobbled down a hot dinner. All the hot things until my body temperature returned to normal.

Because adventures are great and this was a fun one, but being warm? That is still the best thing ever.

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