Icing

Inside our friends’ ice house

Have you ever heard a refrigerator referred to as an icebox? (It’s a grandma thing.) We have friends who live “off the grid,” independent of public utilities — solar panels for electricity, heating exclusively with wood, and cooling the old fashioned way, with ice in a box! They help out with the Rockywold Deephaven Camps annual ice harvest and stock their own (much smaller) ice house in the process.

Rockywold and Deephaven Camps in Holderness, New Hampshire, side by side on Squam Lake, have been housing vacationers June-September for over 100 years. (Squam is our beautiful lake, too! See the “Pontoon” post for more about that.) Guests cabins now have indoor plumbing and electricity, but still no telephones, televisions, air conditioning or heating (except for fireplaces). Meals are served in a rustic dining hall, and for keeping beverages cold, cabins have antique ice boxes that are stocked with ice from the two ice houses. (Sounds divine, doesn’t it?)

Ice saw. (Photo courtesy of RDC)

About 200 tons of ice is harvested from Squam during three days every winter, and 1,400 ice cakes (weighing 120-150lbs each) are packed into the ice houses at each camp. (The process is referred to as “Icing.”) Blanketed with sawdust for insulation, the ice supply lasts through the summer season. Sweet!

The ice must be 11-12 inches thick for the harvest. No worries then about trucks falling through the ice. (Remember the falling-through-the-ice scene in Jack London’s Call of the Wild? Don’t even go there!) The giant ice saw cuts the ice field into rows, then blocks (or cakes), with chainsaws finishing the cuts. Geometry is important, here.  Thanks, math teachers (I say grudgingly).

Final cuts

Once the ice cakes are sawed free, they’re pushed down a channel, brought up to truck-bed level on a loading chute, then packed onto one-ton trucks for transport to the ice houses. I’ve done some pushing (okay, 30 minutes of it), but Todd helped out for a whole day this year and took some great photos. No pun intended, icing is wicked cool!

Pushing

Up the chute

Loading the truck (Photo courtesy of RDC)

There’s lots of camaraderie amongst the crew, male and female from twenty-somethings to a ninety-something, and nothing beats being out on the lake in the winter (except being out on the lake in the summer, of course).

Icing fashion is all about layering. Well, that and safety, especially for the folks operating the power saws. Long johns? Mandatory.

Into the ice house. (Photo courtesy of RDC)

Here’s a a 3 minute time-lapse video of the 2018 ice harvest (with a fun banjo soundtrack). It was put together by RDC employee Eric Morse who also does some crazy kitewing skiing on the frozen lake. Check out one of those videos on YouTube, too. I feel like I should be wearing a helmet when I watch!