Locals Season

We're making it a thing

There’s a stretch of weeks in spring — Ice Out to Memorial Day, four to six weeks most years — when the Lakes Region belongs entirely to itself.

The ski areas have closed or are running on fumes, the last of the die-hards making peace with the corn snow and the brown patches creeping up the trails. The summer people haven’t opened their camps yet; the lake houses are still shuttered, the docks pulled, the kayaks stacked in the garage under a season’s worth of leaves and dust. The shoulder between what just ended and what hasn’t started yet opens up like a long exhale.

And we walk right into it.

This is what people from away don’t always know about living here: spring is just for us. Not summer, when the roads fill and the lakes get busy and every restaurant has a wait on Saturday night. Not fall, which gets its due attention and deserves it. Spring. Specifically, the complicated, luminous, entirely particular stretch from ice-out to the first long Memorial Day weekend that doesn’t make it into the brochures because it’s too honest and too particular and too much ours.

We call it “Locals Season.” It’s not an official designation. Nobody voted on it. It’s just what it is.

Here’s what it actually looks like.

The air changes before anything else does. There’s a warmth in the afternoon sun that wasn’t there last week, the kind that makes you turn your face toward it without deciding to. The mornings are still cold — some days genuinely cold — and you learn to dress in layers and keep a second set of layers in the car because April will change its mind three times between breakfast and bedtime and it’s not worth arguing with. You just adapt. You leave the jacket and the hoodie and the boots and the flip flops in the back of the car and you pick what you need in any given moment. And you don’t complain about it because the afternoon that follows is worth it.

The peepers start. If you haven’t heard them yet, you will, and the first night they’re back is something. That sound carries across the water and through the trees and into your bedroom window which will now stay open until October and it means something specific: winter has genuinely released its grip. You can argue with the temperature. You cannot argue with the peepers.

And last Sunday, the ice went.

If you live here, you know what we mean. Ice-out on Lake Winnipesaukee is an event with a history and a protocol and an actual official observer who has been flying his plane over the lake to track it for decades. The whole region watches. There are guessing contests. There are opinions. And when it finally happens — when the five ports go clear and the call is made — something in the collective chest relaxes. This year that happened April 12th. This is not a small thing. It’s not quirky local color. It’s a real seasonal marker that connects people who live here to a rhythm older than any of us, and when it comes, you feel it.

We forget, every winter, how much water there is.

Looking at a frozen lake is beautiful in its way — white and still and dramatic, the kind of thing you photograph. But it doesn’t prepare you for the visual scale of what’s underneath. The expanse of it. The way Winnipesaukee just goes on in all directions, silver or slate or that particular blue that has no name, mountains rising behind it in the distance. You forget you live next to something this big until it opens back up and reminds you.

The woods do their own version of this. It’s slower, the greening. Not all at once. First it’s a kind of haze, a suggestion — you look at the tree line and something has changed but you can’t quite say what. Then the soft yellow-green of the early leaves, the ones that come in tender and almost translucent, before the full-leaf darkness of summer. There’s a particular quality of light in those weeks, filtered through new leaves, that doesn’t exist at any other time of year. Softer than summer light. Warmer than winter. The kind of light that makes you stop whatever you’re doing for a second and just receive it.

The birds come back in waves. The red-winged blackbirds first, then the robins, and then one morning the full chorus is back and the woods are loud in a way they weren’t the day before. The loons appear on the open water. If you’ve never heard a loon call across a lake on an April morning, you’ve missed one of the things this place keeps for the people who are here for it.

And the people who are here for it are, mostly, people who live here. All year.

That’s the thing about “Locals Season.” It’s not marketed. It doesn’t have a tourism campaign. Nobody is making a long weekend out of it. The restaurants haven’t yet staffed up for summer, the traffic is thin, the trails belong to whoever shows up. You run into your neighbors at the transfer station and at the hardware store where everyone is buying the same things, deck screws and garden soil and something that needs replacing after the winter ate it.

There’s a specific ease to this time of year that you only get by being a year-round part of a place. The familiarity of the off-season, before everything opens back up and the world arrives. The lake is yours. The trails are yours. The parking lot at the boat launch is empty at 7 AM and you can just... stand there, looking at the water, without anyone wondering why you’re standing there looking at the water.

We know why we’re standing there.

Because it’s April and the ice is gone and the light is doing what April light does and the peepers are going and the mountains are half-snow and half-green and the season is turning in the way it only turns once, and you live here, and you know this, and it’s yours.

Summer has its pleasures, and they’re real, and we love them too — the long evenings, the boats on the water, the particular joy of a region fully alive. But summer is shared. Summer belongs to everyone who loves this place, whether they were here in January or not.

Spring is “Locals Season”

Here’s to the season before the season.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

P.S. If you’ve ever wondered whether a life like this is actually built for you, we made something for that. It takes about two minutes and it’s fun. Click here.