The water in the channels continues to flow all winter, which prevents good ice from forming. The ice can also "honeycomb," taking a crystalline form that is brittle and unstable. If you venture into the giant lake's thousands of untracked small channels and bays, you have no way of knowing if the ice is solid or will break under your weight.
We asked Norm Undahl, the owner of Norm's Camp, how people read the ice to travel in the winter.
"Drive on it," he said. "If you fall through, the ice is bad."
Uh, OK.
The only concrete advice we were able to elicit was to ride only on ice with a previous track on it. We decided not to tempt the Wendigo and stuck to well-traveled paths in order to avoid dropping a machine into the icy waters. This was a pretty big disappointment for me, as I was really looking forward to exploring some of the thousands of bays on the huge lake. Perhaps I'll go back with a canoe, get properly lost in the lake's myriad bays and give the Wendigo another chance.