Actually, Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com wrote about this a while back and I think has a solidly plausible explanation. He thinks it is more likely due to flat sheets of ice floating on top of the water. The ice would be moved slowly by the wind, but a large sheet of it would have more than enough momentum to push a fair sized rock along.

This is part of his description of his trip out there:

"We ventured out, armed with cameras, shortly before sunrise. The temperature was just above freezing. The wind, from the south, was quite stiff and very cold. When we reached the lake, we found to our great surprise that the entire lake was moving with the wind, at a speed we estimated at about one half of a mile per hour. The sun was on the lake by now and we could see a few very thin ice sheets that were now dissolving back into water. This whole procession was washing past many of the famous rocks. It's easy to imagine that if it were only few degrees colder when we were there — as it probably had been a couple of hours earlier — the whole surface would be great sheets of thin ice. Solid ice, moving with the surface of the lake and with the inertia of a whole surrounding ice sheet, would have no trouble pushing a rock along the slick muddy floor. Certainly a lot more horsepower than wind alone, as has been proposed. The wind was gusty and moved around some, and since the surface is not perfectly flat and with rocks and various obstructions, the water didn't flow straight; rather it swapped around as it moved generally forward. Ice sheets driven by the water would move in the same way, accounting for the turns and curves found in many of the rock trails."

I don't want to just copy the whole essay he wrote about it, but he goes into a lot more stuff that is quite interesting. Here is the link to the article:

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4021
Source(s):
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4021


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