West Danville, Vt. – At Joe’s Pond, they put a 65-pound cinder block on the ice and tie it to an old- fashioned alarm clock on the deck of Homer Fitts’ cottage, 200 feet away. When the block falls through, the string tugs on the clock and stops it.
A dollar buys you a chance to guess the exact date and time it happens. But you will have plenty of competition: More than 10,000 entries are expected this year, for a potential jackpot of perhaps $5,000.
From Schoodic Lake, Maine, to Nenana, Alaska, and some chilly points in between, it is “ice out” season, with folks wagering on when frozen ponds, lakes and rivers will melt.
Born of cabin fever, the guessing games are cherished rites of spring that attract contestants far from the frozen shores, in part because of the advent of the Web.
“After a long, cold winter, where you’ve had quite a few feet of snow on the ground, you get to the point where it’s enough, you want to look forward to spring,” said Anne Swenson, publisher of the Ely (Minn.) Echo newspaper, which runs a free contest on Shagawa Lake. “It’s silly. You need some silliness at this time of year.”
Black’s Cliff Resort in Hazelhurst, Wis., puts a stuffed dummy named Cliff in a beach chair on Lower Kaubashine Lake and charges $5 to guess the day he gets dunked.
Resort manager Jenny Gibson said the contest is a source of entertainment for her summer guests, “who are sitting behind their desks anywhere from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., wondering what’s going on in the woods.”
The granddaddy of them all is the Nenana Ice Classic, held in Alaska. People pay $2.50 to guess when a wooden tripod on the ice-covered Tanana River will take the plunge. Last year, the $270,500 jackpot was split by eight people who correctly predicted May 2 at 5:29 p.m.
