The annual free community scheduled for Feb. 9 may have been canceled because of ice conditions, but that doesn’t mean the end of skating this winter. In fact, the head of the Evergreen Parks and Recreation District said the lake could be back open for skating as early as Saturday.
Temperatures are forecast to fall below freezing Friday night and remain in the 20s on Saturday.
“We’ll probably be open tomorrow because the temperature is dropping,” Ellen O’Connor, the district’s executive director, said. “Today it was 50 degrees plus and sunny. We have puddles and the ice turned slushy.”
O’Connor says the ice has to be 12 inches thick for safe skating and it’s almost that thick now, except for the slushy surface. Evergreen Lake has been open for skating since Dec. 22, and O’Connor estimated it has been closed only eight times since then because of poor ice conditions. The lake typically offers skating into March, although it did close for the season last year in mid-February.