I ended up walking across Mud Lake to the far side and then spent some time walking the trails there, trails that I don’t often walk because of their distance. From the road it only took a few minutes to get there straight across the lake, not the half hour or more it takes to get there on the path. Near the shore of the far side of the lake the ice around me (but not directly beneath me) started cracking. First I heard a few muffled cracks from deep within the ice, sounds that didn’t concern me because they were normal, but what came next was unnerving. What came next were sharp snaps of surface ice splintering all around me. It sounded like each step I took forward was causing the ice to splinter more and more. I knew there was no chance I was going to break through the ice - you could probably drive a truck out onto it, but panic still set in. I quickly shuffled across the remaining distance of ice and then up onto the side trail east of the boardwalk that for some reason dead ends at the shore of the lake. Today the trail was not a dead ender!
 
Along this side trail is this gigantic boulder. I wonder how it got there. A glacial erratic? It is out of place at Mud Lake because there are no boulders anywhere near that size elsewhere. It’s unique. It’s a monster. And someone painted a monster face on it.