Ticket to glide
An unlikely hike on the ice at Lake Morey
Even when there’s lots of fluffy snow on the ground, New England winter makes hiking harder. (Try to remember what happened the last time you walked into a snowbank without wearing gaiters or knee-high boots.) But when there’s no snow in the woods or the mountains or the city, with temperatures ping-ponging between Pleistocine Epoch and Seattle Mist, finding hiking ground can become a major pain in the ass. Wading into puddles and overflowing streams in January is a guaranteed way to ruin a hike, and while micro-spikes do make it a lot easier to negotiate snowy trails, descending literal slopes of ice with these things can still feel a bit too much like tempting fate.
So what do you do, beyond sorrowfully pushing a Dunks cruller into your face and dreaming of relocation to a consistent climate? Well, I’d like to introduce you to another form of hiking that materializes each winter on the glassy surface of Lake Morey: a freshwater oasis surrounded by mountains on the east edge of Vermont, 20 minutes up the highway from White River Junction. In this sunny, wooded realm, the winters are still reliably frigid enough to transform Lake Morey into one big, slippery solid by late January. Once the lake becomes hard enough to accommodate humans, one of the most unique, ethereal paths in the United States materializes. Temporarily.
