2012-01-21 40 -74

Sat 21 Jan 2012 in 40,-74: 40.4743653, -74.7163425 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

Featherbed Rd., within the Sourlands natural preserve in Hillsborough.

Participants

Officially it was just Jevanyn, but I did encounter two other cars while I was there.

Plans

I was originally going to go in the late afternoon, if at all, because my son's Pinewood Derby was scheduled for that day. But the snow the night before (2-3 inches) prompted the school to stay closed on Saturday, which postponed the event. After some sledding, which exhausted everyone but me, I headed out for what I expected to be a short expedition.

Expedition

My initial approach was to not follow pre-determined directions and just drive toward the hashpoint, but I decided I didn't have the time and would likely end up stuck in the snow somewhere unnecessary.

Luckily, I know where I was going, because a strange weather phenomenon caused my GPS signal to drift. I had the very weird experience of sitting still, but watching the blue dot on the GPS travel several feet a second, as if following something else.

As the geohash was in a fairly wooded area, the light coating of snow highlighted the damage done to a large percentage of trees, standing or lying at all angles. (For anyone not following the weather in the US, an early season snowstorm dropped 4 inches of wet snow at the end of October. Most trees in the 40N latitudes still had leaves, and the otherwise modest snowfall brought a lot of trees to the ground, disrupting power for over a week to some residents.) A few trunks pointed directly at or over roadways, showing they had blocked those roads (or threatened to) before being cleared.

Photos

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  Many trees were damaged in the Halloween snowstorm. @40.4740,-74.7160

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  Someone seems to have been here earlier, and turned around on this narrow bit of road. @40.4740,-74.7166