Fitted in a heavy, blaze orange coat and pants, fishing rod and spud bar in hand, Tim Sacka stands on the frozen edge of Lake St. Clair. Using the spud bar, he chips away at the ice through a layer of fluffy snow, to uncover a hole drilled the day before. He waits 10 minutes for the water to quiet and settle, then sits down on a five-gallon white plastic bucket and dips his line through the frozen slush. The sun is bright, and it’s quiet on the ice.
Sacka has ice fished on Lake St. Clair, situated between Detroit and Canada, for the last 35 years. Here, he’ll catch perch, bluegill, and every once in a while, a bass.
But in recent decades, his fishing trips have started later and later every winter.
“I used to come before Christmas, but for the last three years it’s been the middle of January,” he said, sitting on his bucket, periodically withdrawing the rod to remove the thin layer of ice that had accumulated on the line. It was late January, and only the second time this winter the lake had been frozen enough for Sacka to safely venture out. In addition to starting later, ice fishing season is shorter now, too. For years, Sacka would fish through March. Now, his season ends in February. Two years ago, the waters on Lake St. Clair didn’t freeze enough for him to go ice fishing at all.
“We’ve lost at least a month,” Sacka said. “It makes me sad.”
For Midwesterners, winter has long been a point of pride. It is a region where people boast of surviving temperatures below zero before wind chill; where residents don’t just build snowmen, they build ice fishing shacks to drag onto frozen lakes; and where backyard hockey ponds can outnumber swimming pools.
The St. Paul Winter Carnival in Minnesota, the nation’s oldest winter festival, embodies this devotion. The celebration started as a retort to a reporter from New York who, after a visit to Minnesota in the winter of 1885, declared the region “another Siberia — unfit for human habitation.” The event was born soon after to showcase the beauty and joy of living through a winter of snow and ice. This year marks the carnival’s 136th year.
But climate change is altering winter in the Midwest, playing havoc with traditions. Warming temperatures here — as elsewhere — mean the loss of a way of life, of a culture that began generations ago and that many thought their children’s children would celebrate.
Over the last half-century, the Midwest has warmed on average 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The change to winter has been even more drastic: Temperatures are now 4 degrees F warmer from December to February than they were in 1980. The Upper Midwest — Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan — is experiencing the fastest winter warming of any region in the lower 48 states.
These climbing temperatures are causing noticeable changes across the region. Lake Superior is one of the fastest-warming lakes in the world. Ice cover on the Great Lakes is, on average, 22 percent lower than it was half a century ago. Last winter, the Great Lakes had their second-lowest ice cover since 1973. The lowest was in 2002, when just 12 percent of the Great Lakes were covered in ice.
This winter is no exception. “There is almost no ice across the Great Lakes right now,” Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, a research scientist for the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan, told Grist in December.
By mid-January, the Great Lakes’ ice cover was at just 3 percent, due to warm weather. A cold snap in early February expanded that to 41 percent, but scientists warned the ice was thin and vulnerable to cracking. On February 6, 18 snowmobilers and ATVers ventured onto Lake Erie and became trapped on an ice floe, drifting away from shore. They had to be rescued by helicopter and airboat by the U.S. Coast Guard and a good samaritan.
As temperatures rise and ice disappears, the beloved winter pastimes and rugged cold-weather mentality that helped to define this region are being threatened. Events that communities look forward to all year have been pushed back, shortened, or eliminated altogether. In some instances, winter enthusiasts can chase their activity further north. In others, like in Indigenous communities, the land hosts time-honored traditions such as maple syrup harvesting and ice fishing that can’t be replaced.
“We as Ojibwe people don’t have the luxury of migrating with those trees that have been taking care of our people for thousands of years,” said Jerry Jondreau. He and Katy Bresette own Dynamite Hill Farms, a 30-acre maple tree farm off the shores of Lake Superior on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community reservation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. “We cannot pick up our reservation and move it north to Canada to maintain that relationship with sugar maple.”
On an overcast weekend late last month, thousands of people gathered in rural Roscommon County, Michigan, for the opening weekend of the annual Tip Up Town USA, the largest and longest-running winter festival in Michigan. Visitors rode in on snowmobiles and ATVs. Families pulled small children on sleds. The crowd clustered on the frozen surface of Houghton Lake, Michigan’s largest inland body of water. A thermometer measured 18 degrees F — mild for a northern Michigan day in the dead of winter. Several inches of snow caked the ground, the lake was frozen across, and a steady snowfall blanketed the event throughout the day.
Started in 1951, the festival today attracts about 30,000 people for ice fishing contests, snowmobiling, races on the lake, and activities for kids. It’s Michigan’s ultimate celebration of winter. And it’s a big deal economically for the unincorporated community of approximately 3,350 people.