As climate change warms up New Hampshire’s winters, the annual ice harvest on Squam Lake has been pushed later and later in the season.
But as climate change warms New Hampshire’s winters, the harvest is facing new threats. This winter and last winter, theRyan Hambrook, left, and Neil Cederberg, right, went to elementary school together in Sandwich. Nowadays, they pick each other up for work many mornings, and tend to finish each other's sentences.
Harvesters use a variety of old, wooden tools used to cut, move, and pack the ice into small shelters, where it stays packed in sawdust throughout the summer. As people move around the ice, the warming sun sometimes causes small cracks to form. Workers stand along a rectangular pool of water cut out of the ice known as the “channel.” The ice blocks – a foot by a foot and a half, each weighing around 120 pounds – are pried from one another with long pikes, after being nearly cut through with the saw.
Even with new technology and safety practices that make ice harvesting more efficient and comfortable, it’s not widely practiced throughout New England any more. “Probably half the reason some people come to stay is the way this stays old,” Cederberg said, reflecting on the tradition in the cab of a truck with Hambrook, after the two measured the ice on an early February morning.
"Tradesmanship is something that a lot of younger generations don't know," Willow Furey said. "Running a chainsaw, a mill, or something like that. Those are things we need to pass on to our younger generation so we have people, when these other older generations are ready to retire, we have those people in place to keep this going."
Cederberg is planning to build a new apparatus, a much longer ramp for ice that could allow blocks to be floated directly to shore and transported from there.
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