Brown is filling his ice-house. The clear ice is only from one and a half to four inches thick; all the rest, or nearly a foot, is snow ice, formed by the snow sinking the first under the water and freezing with the water. The same is the case at Walden.
To get ice at all clear or transparent, you must scrape the snow off after each fall. Very little ice is formed by addition below, such a snowy winter as this.
There was a white birch scale yesterday on the snowed-up hole which I made in the very middle of Walden. I have no doubt they blow across the widest part of the pond.
When approaching the pond yesterday, through my bean-field, I saw where some fishermen had come away, and the tails of their string of pickerel had trailed on the deep snow where they sank in it. I afterward saw where they had been fishing that forenoon, the water just beginning to freeze, and also where some had fished the day before with red-finned minnows, which were frozen into an inch of ice; that these men had chewed tobacco and ate apples. All this I knew, though I saw neither man nor squirrel nor pickerel nor crow.
I measure, this afternoon, the snow in the same fields which I measured just a week ago, to see how it has settled. It has been uniformly fair weather of average winter coldness, without any thaw.
West of railroad it averages 11 1/2+. (On the 16th it was 12 1/4.) East of railroad, 14 inches (16th, 15 5/8). Or average of both 12 1/3+ — say 12 1/2. It has settled, therefore, in open fields 1 1/10 inches, showing how very solid it is, as many have remarked.
Not allowing for what of the light snow above the crust may have drifted against the railroad embankment (though I measured on both sides of it).
Trillium Woods, 13 1/4+;16th it was 17. Has settled 3 3/4. It seems, then, that, as it lies light in the wood at first, it settles much faster there, so that, though it was nearly 3 1/2 inches the deepest there a week ago, it is less than 1 inch the deepest there now.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 23, 1856
We wait until 730 to go out to take advantage of the full moon. It is clear and still and the snow seems light but not deep off we go this time to the northwest corner and down into the flood plain but not to the falls instead up the cliff to the corner in the stream but not to the fort instead south towards the big house until we can see its lights and then back over to the regular trail then up the ski trail mostly just zigzagging with edges of my pack boots in the snow until we get to the Ridge Loop Trail. Right at our property boundary Jane has just cleaned the dogs' feet when Acorn goes dancing crazy as if trying to shake one of her feet off Jane says it is because she is cold warms her feet and we head back. We are using the red lights which work in the shadows but in the moonlight you can see the whole woods around you. It turns out when we get back that it has been seven or 8°. I did not notice the cold. ~ zphx 20160123
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