Crews Help Ice Anglers Stranded On Mille Lacs Lake

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – Often, the end of a fishing trip is something anglers don't look forward to, but that wasn't the case for a line of trucks filled with people more than ready to call it a weekend.

"If you were out there Saturday night in the storm, you were cut off," Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida said.

Relentless winds up to 40 miles per hour buried vehicles and caused roads to disappear

"Mille Lacs Lake makes its own weather. We get snow all the time and it's bad out there when it blows," Sheriff Guida said.

Barnacles Resort and Campground used Facebook to keep customers trapped in fish houses updated on the effort to carve them a way out, but Sunday's weather proved too difficult to handle.

"Right away in the morning, with the wind blowing and white out, then I knew it was going to be a bad day. I went out and tried to help everybody and I couldn't see out there, I just, we pulled the plug and got off the lake," said James Kromer, owner of Barnacles Resort.

Newly plowed roads were quickly covered in snow, trucks got stuck or broke down and a weekend of fishing carried into Monday.

"There was like 5-foot drifts up to the hood of my truck," said Rick Frascone, of Cottage Grove. "We were buried."

But not defeated.

"I was understanding. I was loving it. I was hanging out in the ice castle. We still had gas and propane so we were warm," Frascone said. "They ran us out pizzas, we were good."

On the final weekend of winter walleye season, these families ventured home with more than just a few fishing tales.

"Big thank you to chuck from Tony's Outdoor Service because he hung around with us for three hours digging both of our castles out," Frascone said.

The sheriff says a weekend like this one should serve a lot of valuable lessons for people going ice fishing – to bring extra food for several days, extra propane, check weather forecasts and be prepared to cut your weekend short if dangerous weather is on the horizon.