Cold days, warm memories
Somewhere high over Lake Ontario last February the weather gods were cackling with wild abandon. They had cooked up a little lake-effect snow, which is effectively a storm system without the system, a blizzard-in-a-bottle created by frigid winds freezing the vapor rising from comparatively warm bodies of water.
Lake communities such as Buffalo bear the brunt of it, but tendrils of these frozen whiteouts can reach across the Tug Hill Plateau into the west-central Adirondacks. These stinging, cloudless snows sail on icy winds that speed across frozen North Country lakes. It is weather only northern pike could love. At least, that was the hope.
The unscientific but solemnly accepted rule of ice fishing, said veteran Adirondack ice fisherman and guide Matt Burnett, is that the worse the weather, the better your luck will be. If this were true, it seemed to me at the time, we would need to haul our catch away in dump trucks.
photographer Mike Lynch and I caught up with Burnett on a sizable, irregularly shaped pond in the Tri-Lakes, where he was guiding Vermont physician Glenn Goldman and partner Nina
