Snow-Covered Ice

It’s hard to beat the sensation of skating on ice that’s under a thin blanket of powder snow. The snow muffles the sound of your blades and helps you focus in on the natural splendor around you. Snow hides the bumps so you don’t have to think about them anymore. And if the snow is more than an inch deep, it starts to fly over the tops of your boots, and you feel airborne.
But before you race out the door to skate the first snow-covered lake you can find, here’s one rule about skating on snow-covered ice: You must know what the ice looked like before it the snow covered it up. Otherwise, you could skate onto thin ice without having a clue until it’s too late.
Skating through up to three inches of freshly fallen dry powder is a blast. However, if it’s heavy and wet, if it’s windblown, or if it has melted and refrozen into a crust, don’t go there.
As a general rule, if the surface is a mix of exposed ice and patches of snow, always stay on the exposed ice. Patches of snow may have bumps, sticks, rocks or thin ice hiding under them. You have to think about why the snow caught there and not elsewhere: It could have stuck to a stick or rock or adhered to wet ice around a thin or open spot. It’s best not to take chances out there!

Skating across snow-covered ice on Squam Lake

Isolated patches of snow like these are best avoided, because you never know what might be hiding under them.