Wild Ice & SaunaJan – Feb

Black Ice Touring

What black ice actually is

Black ice is what skaters actually wait for. It forms on still water in hard cold with no snow on top, and it freezes clear rather than white — so you are skating over a window, looking down at weed and stones and the occasional fish, several metres below your blades.

It sounds like nothing else. Clear ice under a blade rings, and a crack propagating away from you makes a rising whistle that is alarming the first time and then becomes the reason people do this.

The window is short. One fall of snow ends it — the snow insulates the ice and roughens the surface, and what was glass becomes a rink. January into February is the likeliest stretch, and some years barely deliver it at all.

Why it cannot be booked

Which means this is not something you book for a date. It is something you are told about with a few days' notice, when the lakes have set and the forecast is holding, and we move the week around it.

If you are already in Sweden in the right fortnight, we watch for you and call. If you are building a trip specifically around it, plan a window rather than a day and have a second thing to do with the time.

Clear ice is also thinner-looking than it is, which fools people into caution about the wrong thing and carelessness about the right one. The guide sounds it constantly with the pole, and that tapping is the sound of the day.

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