Well, I did it. I just cancelled my May 4 Clearwater permit as this is obviously not the year for it! That prompted a thought which I explored in an
article for work. How often is the BWCA actually paddleable by opening day (or by fishing opener for that matter?) Only seven lakes that serve as entry points or that are on the way to entry points have consistent historical data. (I omitted Sawbill for this reason.) It turns out that from those seven lakes, the median ice out date was found to be May 9th, a little over a week after “opening day.” I then broke down the data to show "odds of a canoe trip by a particular date. What are the odds of sneaking in a canoe trip in the first half of April well before opening day? For the data available, there was about a 9% chance of ice being out in any given year. The odds of having ice out in the couple weeks leading up to opening day (and being able to take that canoe trip on May 1) are about a 50% chance across the board which means it's 50/50 for opening day. Now, if your permit is for May 8th, a week into the season, that chance goes up to a 76%, 92% in the week around fishing opener, and is about 99% for June 1st (the lone dissenter being a June 3 ice out in 1936 on Gunflint Lake.) Another point to note on the data is that the lakes along the Gunflint Trail usually ice out later than the Ely side with an Ely permit being nearly twice as likely to have ice-out for opening day as the Gunflint on the data available (67% chance for Ely vs 37% chance for the Gunflint) and that trend continues heading into summer. Guess I'll have to wait for my Memorial Day trip!