Maine holds the oldest ice-out observation in the country: Sebago Lake, 1807. Twenty two Maine lakes appear in the USGS compilation, and the state still publishes ice-out for well over a hundred lakes every spring.
Dates from past winters. For today’s ice, ask the agency that manages the water.
The Bureau of Parks and Lands posts ice-out for more than 150 Maine waters as reports arrive, and keeps an archive of past years going back to 2003. Ice-out information courtesy DACF Bureau of Parks and Lands Boating Facilities Division.
40 of 40 of the most recent recorded years had already seen ice out on Damariscotta Lake by this date.
The median across the whole record is April 17, which is 175 days ago on this year’s calendar. The record itself runs to 2019, so this is a comparison against history and not a statement about the current season.
This counts recorded years, not this year; the current season comes from the agency linked above.
Ordered by how much record there is behind them. The median is across every recorded year; the second figure is across the most recent 30 recorded years, which is the fairer thing to compare against a lake you know today.
Names are reproduced exactly as the source database records them, which is often a shortened form: a lake filed as “Detroit” or “George” is Detroit Lake or Lake George to everyone who lives on it. The names stay as recorded, because United States lakes split unpredictably between “Lake X” and “X Lake”.
Lake in Maine · 182 recorded years, 1837 to 2019
Across the whole record, ice out has moved 9 days earlier per century across the record.
Mean date per decade. Only decades with four or more observations are shown, and the scale starts near the shortest bar rather than at January 1, so small differences stay visible.
Lake in Maine · 178 recorded years, 1840 to 2019
Across the whole record, ice out has moved 9 days earlier per century across the record.
Mean date per decade. Only decades with four or more observations are shown, and the scale starts near the shortest bar rather than at January 1, so small differences stay visible.
Lake in Maine · 175 recorded years, 1836 to 2019
Across the whole record, ice out has moved 8 days earlier per century across the record.
Mean date per decade. Only decades with four or more observations are shown, and the scale starts near the shortest bar rather than at January 1, so small differences stay visible.
Lake in Maine · 172 recorded years, 1848 to 2019
Across the whole record, ice out has moved 7 days earlier per century across the record.
Mean date per decade. Only decades with four or more observations are shown, and the scale starts near the shortest bar rather than at January 1, so small differences stay visible.
| Lake | Record | Median ice out | Last 30 years | Earliest | Latest | Change per century |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Damariscotta Lake | 1837 to 2019 (182) | Apr 17 | Apr 11 | Mar 13 1981 | May 6 1888 | -8.8 days |
| Cobbosseecontee Lake | 1840 to 2019 (178) | Apr 21 | Apr 14 | Mar 16 1981 | May 10 1888 | -9.1 days |
| Lake Auburn | 1836 to 2019 (175) | Apr 23 | Apr 17 | Mar 19 2016 | May 14 1874 | -8.2 days |
| Moosehead Lake | 1848 to 2019 (172) | May 8 | May 4 | Apr 14 1945 | May 29 1878 | -6.6 days |
| Sebago Lake | 1807 to 2019 (165) | Apr 17 | Apr 13 | Mar 14 1932 | May 9 1888 | -10.4 days |
| West Grand Lake | 1878 to 2019 (142) | Apr 29 | Apr 27 | Apr 2 2006 | May 19 1918 | -7.3 days |
| Rangeley Lake | 1880 to 2019 (140) | May 7 | May 5 | Apr 14 1921 | May 24 1882 | -5.5 days |
| Sebec Lake | 1879 to 2019 (139) | Apr 29 | Apr 29 | Apr 1 1902 | May 15 1972 | -4.6 days |
| Pennesseewassee (norway) Lake | 1874 to 2019 (137) | Apr 23 | Apr 20 | Mar 30 2016 | May 13 1874 | -6.9 days |
| Richardson Lake | 1880 to 2019 (132) | May 6 | May 3 | Apr 14 1945 | May 24 1888 | -5.2 days |
| Swan Lake | 1891 to 2010 (119) | Apr 19 | Apr 15 | Mar 13 2010 | May 7 1939 | -6.5 days |
| Mooselookmeguntic Lake | 1884 to 2019 (118) | May 6 | May 4 | Apr 14 1945 | May 23 1972 | -5.1 days |
| Kezar Lake | 1901 to 2018 (114) | Apr 23 | Apr 21 | Mar 27 2012 | May 6 1928 | -2.9 days |
| Thompson Lake | 1902 to 2019 (109) | Apr 20 | Apr 15 | Mar 24 2010 | May 8 1940 | -5.2 days |
| Aziscohos Lake | 1913 to 2016 (96) | May 5 | May 3 | Apr 14 1945 | May 21 1972 | -1.8 days |
| China Lake | 1874 to 2019 (93) | Apr 17 | Apr 14 | Mar 16 2016 | May 6 1875 | -10 days |
| Maranacook Lake | 1925 to 2019 (93) | Apr 19 | Apr 16 | Mar 21 2010 | May 4 1939 | -9.3 days |
| Embden Pond | 1925 to 2019 (88) | Apr 26 | Apr 25 | Mar 27 2012 | May 13 1972 | -3 days |
| Messalonskee Lake | 1909 to 2019 (85) | Apr 22 | Apr 21 | Mar 20 2010 | May 8 1940 | -6.4 days |
| Eagle Lake | 1922 to 2019 (84) | May 7 | May 5 | Apr 14 1945 | May 23 1974 | -1.2 days |
| Portage Lake | 1925 to 2008 (83) | May 7 | May 4 | Apr 14 1945 | May 26 1926 | -6.8 days |
| Squa Pan Lake | 1930 to 2008 (70) | May 3 | May 2 | Apr 13 1945 | May 18 1972 | record too short |
Dates are day of year, rendered on a common non leap calendar so the same stored value always reads the same way. “Change per century” is a least squares line through the observations, shown only where a record spans 80 years or more; a century figure extrapolated from a 40 year window describes the decades that happened to be sampled rather than the lake. Where a record ends before 2010 the card says so; a great many of these series stopped when a particular person stopped keeping them.
Of the 21 Maine lakes with a record long enough to state a century trend, 21 show ice out moving earlier. The median shift across those lakes is -6.5 days per century. That is a description of a line fitted to observations, not a forecast, and any single lake can and does swing three or four weeks between consecutive years.
One of them has winters on record in which the water never froze across at all. Those years are kept in the data rather than dropped, because a winter with no ice is an observation and treating it as a gap would quietly bias every average toward an earlier thaw.
Charles B. Fobes. A great deal of Maine's record exists because of one man in Portland. Charles B. Fobes started collecting ice clearing dates in the 1940s, recruited observers on lakes across the state, and dug older dates out of newspapers and company logs. USGS says outright that much of this data would have been lost or never collected without his work.
Ice-out means the season starts. In Maine the ice-out date is a practical one. It sets when the docks go in, when the sporting camps open, and when open water fishing can begin, which is why so many of the early observers were water companies, power companies and newspapers rather than scientists.
Benson, B., Magnuson, J. and Sharma, S. (2000). Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database. (G01377, Version 1). Boulder, Colorado USA. National Snow and Ice Data Center. https://doi.org/10.7265/N5W66HP8 Accessed 2026-08-24.
Which is worth knowing, because it means those series can be checked against a federal document rather than taken on trust. It also carries the observer names for every lake, which is the part of this record that is really a social history.
Hodgkins, G.A., 2010, Historical ice-out dates for 29 lakes in New England, 1807 to 2008: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2010-1214, 32 p. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2010/1214/
The single oldest recorded ice-out date anywhere in the United States is Sebago Lake in 1807, and Sebago is also the lake in this dataset that most often fails to freeze completely at all.
Ice out and ice in dates are historical observations compiled by the National Snow and Ice Data Center and, for the New England lakes, by the U.S. Geological Survey. They describe past years only, and a past year says nothing about the ice on a lake today. For current ice and for anything involving going out on it, contact Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. National picture: every state with a lake ice record →
Hero image: “Sebago Lake 01” by Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0