Some stories directly mentioned skating, but other references were more oblique. No scientific record of the lake’s ice conditions existed, so Liu interviewed community members and searched the archives of local papers to determine which years Carnegie had and hadn’t been safe to skate on. Advised by Vecchi Nadir Jeevanjee, a research scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and Sirisha Kalidindi, a postdoctoral research associate in Vecchi’s research group, Liu began piecing together the history of Lake Carnegie’s ice. In the summer of 2020, Grace Liu ’23 - then an intern at the High Meadows Environmental Institute - tackled the question.
When the lake was unskateable the following winter, and the winter thereafter, Vecchi began to wonder: Was Lake Carnegie freezing as often as it used to? For this brief moment, the lake became … of everybody. “There were people walking on the ice, playing pickup hockey games on the ice. “It seemed like the whole community was out there,” recalled Vecchi, a skater and youth hockey coach. That January, geosciences professor Gabriel Vecchi got his first - and, to date, only - taste of Princeton ice. Yet Princeton’s average winter temperatures have warmed by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit since then, and Lake Carnegie has not frozen deeply enough to meet the municipality’s criteria for safe skating since the winter of 2014–15. “He had a switch cut and I got a pretty good tanning,” one of the boys recalled, “but it was quite an adventure.” One spring, two young miscreants surfed a thick slab of ice for two miles down Stony Brook, until an angry father intercepted them. “It was all skating, and everybody skated,” recalled one resident quoted in a 1985 Historical Society of Princeton newsletter article. Students, children, and families skated through the winter on Lake Carnegie and held communal bonfires along its banks. which operated a mile northwest of campus, on what is now Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve - harvested hundreds of tons of ice each winter for year-round deliveries. Ice once played a significant role in Princeton life.Ī century ago, the town’s average winter temperatures hovered just below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Princeton Ice Co. Lake Carnegie was once safe for skating nearly every winter it is now safe one out of five
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