HOLDERNESS – Some 200 tons of ice which will be used this coming summer in ice boxes at the Rockywold-Deephaven camps are being harvested from a Squaw Cove in Squam Lake this week.
The 140 pound blocks of ice help keep alive a connection between the camps and the natural environment that surrounds them says John Jurszyinski, camp director, who is working along with other members of the ice-cutting crew.
He says that ice harvest maintains the camp’s unique tradition of supplying its summer guests with ice boxes, rather than refrigerators, to keep things cool during the summer months.
“Every now and then the question is raised if getting ice from the lake is the most efficient form of refrigeration for the camps. But that was pretty well settled some years ago. In 1967, the camps bought four compact refrigerators as an experiment. No guests wanted them, so they ended up in staff quarters,”’ says Jurszyinski.
He said that the ice in Squaw Cove, located off from Metcalf Road in Sandwich, is about 13 inches thick, nearly twice as thick as the ice in True Cove, which is used for ice harvesting some years and is located next to the camps.
Norm Lyford of Ashland, who has been harvesting ice from Squaw Cove on Squam Lake for 67 years, says that the basics of the mid-winter ritual have changed very little.
“We used to use an old one-lunger engine with a saw like you’d use on cordwood to cut the ice with. It had a wide belt that ran the saw,”’ recalls Lyford, who has worked at the camps ever since he was a teenager, and recalls helping his father, Colby, build many of the more than 60 rustic cabins that are set back amidst tree stands and barely visible from the lake.
Now 85, Lyford has cut back on his role in the harvest and no longer mans the saw. Wearing ice creepers to keep from falling on the slick surface, Lyford and others work with ice hooks to push the 140-pound blocks of ice through a 16-inch wide channel and into a loading chute where they are winched onto a ramp and then loaded into the back of pickup trucks for transport to one of the two sawdust-insulated ice houses for storage.
Jurszyinski said that around 3,000 blocks of ice, weighing between 125 pounds and 150 pounds, will be harvested this week and will be used in the ice boxes in the camp’s 65 cabins starting in June.
“In mid-September when we close there are always blocks of ice left over, which shows how well the ice houses do their work,”’ says Jurszyinski.
Carl Hansen, who operates the 36-inch motorized ice saw, says that the undercarriage of the apparatus is about 40 years old but a new engine and a clutch have been added to make its operation more safe and efficient.
The saw is used to cut 40 foot long rows, 16 inches apart, and then cuts across the rows at 20 inch intervals to separate the blocks. The saw penetrates deep into the ice but stops short of making contact with the water, which would freeze on the saw and slow its operation.
Hansen says there is as much art as there is science to guiding the saw. “You have to get a feel for the ice so that you don’t cut all the way through to the water. But that’s hard some times because in just a short distance the thickness can change by an inch or two,” he says.
Workers then use fork-shaped pikes and chain saws to cut the blocks free. In order to keep the ice free of petroleum products, no bar and chain oil is used in the power saws, whose bars are lubricated by contact with the water.
Ice harvesting was at one time a major winter industry across northern New England, supplying millions of tons of ice to the greater Boston and New York areas which were delivered by special ice trains which carried the ice, stored in large buildings where it was insulated by layers of sawdust, to urban areas along the East Coast.
The Lakes Region was a major supplier of ice with large storage sheds located near railroad tracks near Gilford Beach and on Paugus Bay near the former Burger King property.
CAPTIONS
Carl Hansen cuts ice on Squaw Cove on Squam Lake with a motorized saw as members of the ice harvest crew move the blocks of ice down a channel where they are picked up and taken to Rockywold-Deephaven camps where they are used in ice boxes during the summer months.
(Roger Amsden photo for the Laconia Daily Sun)
Norm Lyford, 85, of Ashland, guides blocks of ice down a channel at Squaw Cove on Squam Lake. The ice is being harvested for use in ice boxes at the Rockywold-Deephaven camps in Holderness. (Roger Amsden photo for the Laconia Daily Sun)