Michigan Lake Ice Out Dates and Ice In Records

Q: How do I know whether the ice is safe?

Contact your state agency and look at the water yourself. Every figure here is the date ice finished leaving a lake, or froze over it, in a past year. Ice strength varies across a single lake on a single day with current, springs, snow cover and depth.

Q: Who publishes this year's Michigan ice out dates?

Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Michigan does not publish a statewide ice-out dataset. The long Michigan series in this data come from federal Great Lakes research and from university field stations rather than from a state programme. This page is the long historical record; theirs is the current season.

Q: How far back do Michigan lake ice records go?

The oldest in this dataset is Grand Traverse Bay, first observed in 1852. This page covers 6 Michigan water bodies with at least 40 recorded years each, 1 of which span a century or more, and 780 individual observations in total.

Q: Is ice out getting earlier?

In this data, mostly yes. Of the 2 Michigan lakes whose record is long enough to state a century trend, 2 show ice out moving earlier. That figure is a least squares line fitted to the observations, which is the same simple description the ice phenology literature uses. It describes what the record did; it is not a projection of what the next decade will do.

Where this year’s dates come from

Michigan does not publish a statewide ice-out dataset. The long Michigan series in this data come from federal Great Lakes research and from university field stations rather than from a state programme.

Michigan Department of Natural Resources

Today against the record

How this date has usually played out

Where today sits in the record for Grand Traverse Bay

40 of 40 of the most recent recorded years had already seen ice out on Grand Traverse Bay by this date.

The median across the whole record is April 7, which is 180 days from now on this year’s calendar. The record itself runs to 2015, 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.

Lake by lake

The deepest Michigan records

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”.

Grand Traverse Bay

Lake in Michigan · 122 recorded years, 1852 to 2015

Apr 7

median ice out

Apr 6

last 30 recorded years

Feb 24

earliest, 1981

May 8

latest, 1874

Across the whole record, ice out has moved 6 days earlier per century across the record.

Freeze over has moved 6 days later per century across the record, median Feb 10.

44 winters on record it did not freeze across at all, most recently 2017.

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.

Gull Lake

Lake in Michigan · 89 recorded years, 1925 to 2019

Mar 26

median ice out

Mar 21

last 30 recorded years

Jan 10

earliest, 1933

Apr 26

latest, 1961

Across the whole record, ice out has moved 9 days earlier per century across the record.

Freeze over has moved 15 days later per century across the record, median Jan 6.

3 winters on record it did not freeze across at all, most recently 2002.

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.

Green Bay at Menominee

Lake in Michigan · 73 recorded years, 1900 to 1973record ends 1973

Apr 8

median ice out

Apr 9

last 30 recorded years

Mar 4

earliest, 1932

May 4

latest, 1972

The record spans 73 years, under the 80 year span needed to state a century trend.

One winter on record, 1964, it did not freeze across at all.

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.

Fair Lake

Lake in Michigan · 63 recorded years, 1956 to 2019

Mar 20

median ice out

Mar 18

last 30 recorded years

Feb 1

earliest, 1989

Apr 9

latest, 2014

The record spans 63 years, under the 80 year span needed to state a century trend.

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.

A person in a red jacket standing on brown grass at the foot of a wall of shattered lake ice piled far higher than they are — An ice shove on Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin, with a person on the bank for scale. Wind on a rotting spring sheet can drive it ashore in minutes and stack it well above head height, which is one reason a tidy single ice out date hides a genuinely messy few days. “Ice shove - Lake Winnebago, Oshkosh, WI USA - March 2025” by Jm mortellwi, CC BY-SA 4.0

Every lake

All 6 Michigan water bodies with a long record

Lake	Record	Median ice out	Last 30 years	Earliest	Latest	Change per century
Grand Traverse Bay	1852 to 2015 (122)	Apr 7	Apr 6	Feb 24 1981	May 8 1874	-5.7 days
Gull Lake	1925 to 2019 (89)	Mar 26	Mar 21	Jan 10 1933	Apr 26 1961	-9.4 days
Green Bay at Menominee	1900 to 1973 (73)	Apr 8	Apr 9	Mar 4 1932	May 4 1972	record too short
Fair Lake	1956 to 2019 (63)	Mar 20	Mar 18	Feb 1 1989	Apr 9 2014	record too short
Houghton Lake	1951 to 2002 (52)	Apr 13	Apr 12	Mar 10 2000	May 1 1972	record too short
Duck Lake	1962 to 2002 (40)	Mar 23	Mar 22	Feb 22 1999	Apr 13 1982	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.

False colour satellite view of Minnesota in spring, with ice covered lakes showing as pale cyan and lakes that have already opened showing as black, against green and tan land — Spring thaw over Minnesota, in false colour. Ice still on a lake reads pale cyan; a lake that has already opened reads black. You can watch ice out happen across a whole state in a single frame, which is how agencies now sanity check reports that used to come only from people standing on a shore. “Spring Thaw in Minnesota (MODIS 2025-04-30)” — MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC — Public domain

What the record says

What the Michigan record shows

Of the 2 Michigan lakes with a record long enough to state a century trend, 2 show ice out moving earlier. The median shift across those lakes is -5.7 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.

4 of these Michigan water bodies also carry a freeze over record. Freeze up is the harder half to observe and there is far less of it nationally, which is a shame, because in this dataset it moves more than ice out does.

3 of them have 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.

For a bay of one of the Great Lakes, freezing over and opening are messier ideas than they are on a small inland lake, and the Michigan series reflect that. Several of them record winters where the water never froze across at all.

Higgins Lake has no published record. Michigan's best known ice-out lakes are not the ones with published records. Higgins Lake in particular appears in neither compilation behind these pages.

Satellite view of the Great Lakes with the northern land still under snow, the lakes themselves dark open water, and pale green sediment plumes in the shallow western basin of Lake Erie — The Great Lakes with snow still lying on the land north of them and no ice left on the water. On a lake this size, freezing over and opening are not single moments: shallow bays close first, the deep middle may never freeze at all in a mild winter, and the date somebody writes down is a judgement call. “Spring Thaw across the Great Lakes (MODIS)” — MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC — Public domain

Provenance

Where these Michigan numbers came from

The observations

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.

Grand Traverse Bay carries 44 winters on record in which it never froze across, more than any other water body in this dataset.

Common questions

Michigan lake ice FAQ

When does ice usually go out on lakes in Michigan?

It varies by lake, and this page gives a figure for each one rather than a single state number. Grand Traverse Bay, which has the deepest record in Michigan at 122 recorded years, has a median ice out of April 7 across the whole record and April 6 across its most recent 30 recorded years. Smaller and shallower lakes open earlier than deep ones, and the north of a state runs behind the south by weeks.

How do I know whether the ice is safe?

Who publishes this year's Michigan ice out dates?

What exactly counts as ice out?

For a bay of one of the Great Lakes, freezing over and opening are messier ideas than they are on a small inland lake, and the Michigan series reflect that. Several of them record winters where the water never froze across at all. Definitions genuinely differ between lakes and between observers, and the USGS report behind much of this data says plainly that the exact definition, including where the observer stood, is not known with confidence in most cases. That matters most when comparing two lakes against each other and least when comparing one lake against its own past.

How far back do Michigan lake ice records go?

Is ice out getting earlier?

Broken plates of lake ice pushed up against a rocky shoreline with open grey water beyond — Michigan water. Ice out is the day this becomes possible again, and in most of these records it is the day somebody decided a boat could cross. “Ice on Grand Traverse Bay” — Sheet7568 — CC0

The rest of the Michigan year

Plan the rest of your Michigan calendar

Michigan lake ice inThe autumn half of the same records: when these lakes have typically frozen over. Together the two are the length of the ice season.Every state with a lake ice recordThe national picture: every state with a lake ice record and the deepest series in the country.Michigan winter outlookWhat NOAA expects from the season that puts the ice on.Michigan fall foliageThe other end of the year on the same water.

More Midwest states with lake ice records

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 Michigan Department of Natural Resources. National picture: every state with a lake ice record →
Hero image: “Ice on Grand Traverse Bay” — Sheet7568 — CC0