top of page

That Time I...

Broke Through a Frozen Lake in the Middle of the Sylvania Wilderness

I've spent a lot of time exploring the Sylvania Wilderness Area, mainly on foot.  It gets way too busy in the summer to book campsites, so I take advantage of the off season to hike around instead.  The hiking is great!  Especially when you visit in early spring after a few hard frosts like I did in 2021.  All of the peat moss in the wetlands had frozen solid, making for easy walking through the swamps to access hidden lakes far from trails.


On this particular trip, I combined bushwhacking through old growth, trail hiking, and passing over frozen lakes to visit quite a few lakes that normall never see any visitors.  Places like Louise, Dorothy, and Elsie Lakes on the west side of Clark Lake, and Germain and Clear Lakes in the east/central part of the Wilderness.  Best of all, during the early spring before the ice had left the lakes there's almost nobody here so I had the entire place to myself for the weekend.


Which, if I might add, is a somewhat dangerous time to be hiking on sketchy rotten ice on remote lakes miles from escape.  I started to get a little too confident on day two of my adventure and had stopped checking for ice thickness regularly.  Big mistake!  While hiking along High Lake I was so focused on open patches of water preventing me from getting to the island that I blundered my way right into thin ice nearer to shore.  One leg quickly went down to the knee, the next up to my thigh.  I splatted widely to catch myself from going down further and deftly pulled myself out the way I'd come.  Turns out I was heading right for open water on the lake's edge.  Oops.  


With waterlogged boots on a 40°F day, I wrung everything out the best that I could and carried on.  I wound up hiking another four miles or so and visited a couple more lakes, all in the name of adventure.  

Flickr Photo Gallery:
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Instagram
  • Nathan Miller LinkedIn

© 2013-2025 Nathan Invincible Miller

bottom of page