Thousands of people were supposed to ice fish during this weekend’s annual Walleye Challenge on the Great Sacandaga Lake.
Instead, for the second-consecutive year, the fishing competition has been reduced to a raffle and a big party in Fulton County.
Organizers are mulling whether to continue the 15-year event going forward.
“We can have a raffle any time of year. But we want people to fish,” event co-organizer Henry “Beaver” Ross told me this week. “So we might leave it up to all the contestants and ask them what they think.”
Of course, the ice fishing portion of the Walleye Challenge was canceled because the ice is simply not thick enough across the 29-mile-long reservoir. While most bays have sufficiently deep cover, the middle of the Great Sacandaga has spots of open water, said Ross, a 57-year-old Mayfield resident.
“We don’t like to make that call,” Ross said. “We get upset when we can’t have the fishing part of it, because that’s what it’s all about.”
Sadly, the Walleye Challenge has suffered the same fate as many winter events across the country. It’s been a “lost winter” in the Midwest, with record-high temperatures, exacerbated by the El Niño weather pattern, leading to canceled pond hockey tournaments and melted dreams of ice sculptures, according to The Washington Post.
Much of the Northeast experienced a warmer-than-normal January, ranking among the 20 warmest Januarys on record, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center.
And in the greater Capital Region and Mohawk Valley, Nordic skiers have had to search far and wide for terrain, while snowmobilers have seen their typical weekend plans run aground.
Ross said this is the first year since boyhood he hasn’t taken his snowmobile out of the trailer. Last year he logged only 24 miles, while in past winters he’d traveled the equivalent of two-thirds of the way across the country.
“In the last five years, it’s gotten worse every year,” Ross told me.
During winters of late we’ve seen Lake George’s Ice Castles reimagined as a light display. And polar bear plunges haven’t required organizers to drill through frozen water – brave participants need only scamper into thawed lakes.
“The weather has been so volatile. One day it’s 50 degrees, the next day it’s 17,” said Fulton County Sheriff Richard Giardino, who is warning people to take extreme caution on the county’s 44 lakes. He said two snowmobilers have gone through ice on the Great Sacandaga this season, with no injuries reported in Fulton County.
“As you’re asking me these questions, I’m thinking, ‘So how does this all fit into global warming?’ I don’t know,” Giardino said.
But scientists, such as University at Albany climate researcher Mathias Vuille, are clear.
“It’s a sign of our warming planet,” said Vuille, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, who has studied climate change for more than 30 years. “If we just look at the observational record in the Northeast, winter temperatures now are already 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were in the earlier half of the 20th century. And this will continue.”
As winters warm faster than summers, and as nights warm faster than days, cold extremes see the most rapid rise, Vuille says. “And that affects things such as freezing over a lake.”
Vuille said while winters will still vary from one to the next, the trend is toward milder, shorter seasons that without mitigation will significantly alter what Northeast winters look like by the end of the century.
“The climate is very variable – it varies from year to year. So we'll have cold winters again,” Vuille said. “But this variability is superimposed on this long-term warming trend, so in the long run, this is going to get very hard.”
That means winter recreation like skiing, ice fishing and snowmobiling is likely to look very different, too.
As an avid skier, that prospect bums out Vuille. Downhill resorts will increasingly rely on manmade snow – as an indication, Winter Olympics have been competed almost entirely on the manufactured stuff for the past decade. And in the Northeast, winter enthusiasts are likely to need to travel to ever-higher elevations or latitudes to find that adrenaline rush or big catch, Vuille said.
It all adds up to a great deal of uncertainty for places like the Mohawk Valley and the Adirondacks, where local economies complement robust summer tourism by marketing themselves as cold-weather destinations.
“It goes up and down. So there are lean years and there are fat years, and you have to be able to sustain those businesses through the lean years,” said State Assemblyman Robert Smullen, who not only represents the region but also worked as executive director of the Hudson River-Black River Regulating District, giving him a strong familiarity of water levels and ice moves.
For now, Fulton County will continue to tout its traditional icy offerings, according to Tourism Coordinator Carla Kolbe, who said she didn’t have data quantifying the dip in winter tourism as a result of the season’s mild weather.
Kolbe said people remain optimistic, even about the current winter.
“I think people still are hoping for one more good storm, but it’s out of your control and nothing you can plan on,” she said. “You just have to look ahead and hope that if it's going to be like this, that we're going to have a great spring.”
But at some point, wishful thinking ceases to be enough. We have to recognize that sweeping changes are needed to limit the emissions of the greenhouse gasses that are warming our planet.
“There’s no doubt that human beings affect the climate. The question is how much so and what should we do about it?” Assemblyman Smullen told me.
Scientific experts are more certain. As Vuille noted, we need nothing short of a global push for renewable energy sources to replace the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. That’s what it will take to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, which is a bare-minimum international climate policy target.
“It's still possible to do that,” Vuille said.
But it’s going to take broad buy-in – not misguided skepticism.
“In the end, what really hits home are the local impacts. We can talk in the abstract about how many degrees warming we are seeing, and that doesn't mean much to most people,” Vuille said “But if it affects their daily lives, and if they can actually see and feel the changes, that is usually more of a wake-up call.”
The ice fishing tournament is off once again.
It’s time to rise and shine.