Every January marks a special weekend when 10 to 15 volunteers brave the cold temperatures to harvest ice the "old-fashioned way" out of Pierce Pond. The question is posed each year by onlookers: "Why go through the work of cutting ice in the freezing cold and storing it for summer usage when you can buy it at the local market?" The answer inevitably is "it seems ridiculous to buy ice when you have such perfect ice right here in the lake." The ice is judged by it's thickness of solid blue mass. There is no mistaking lake ice from manufactured ice from a machine. Solid blue ice stays frozen in your glass long after the iced tea is gone!
Not all sporting camps harvest their own ice, but the owners at Pierce Pond Camps do. It begins with five men pushing and two men pulling the vintage 1928 Ford cutter. The blade is lowered into the ice to cut in a crisscross pattern, 16 rows one way and 11 the other. The cutter blade is only 12 inches, so if the ice is thicker than that (usually it is more like 22 inches thick), the remainder is cut with large hand saws. The ice block is created. The blocks are poked through with metal picks for removal from the lake. A typical block of ice can weigh 240 pounds and looks more like a dragon's tooth than a giant ice cube. The cubes are harvested by a pulley system and placed on snowmobile trailers for transport to the ice house. There the ice blocks are stacked high, then packed in sawdust which keeps them in a frozen state indefinitely.
A typical year will yield 120 blocks of ice representing a weight of close to 15 tons. Harvesting is all done in one day with time out for a hot homemade lunch. This is pretty close to how it would have been done in the early 1900s. The only modern time exception is the usage of a snowmobile, and that is only because they don't have any oxen at Pierce Pond!