2009-01-14 43 -84

About

The day's coordinates were conveniently located in the northbound lane of a road barely before a T intersection.

Expedition

excellentdude: As cold as it's been around here, I wanted to try to break the cold geohash record if the opportunity arose. Today, everything aligned just right for that to happen.

1)During the wee hours of the morning, a front blew through the area and started to make the temperature fall precipitously.

2)I had stuff to do today, but nothing that had to be done at a particular time or in a particular place.

3)The coordinates in the graticule north of me fell directly in a road, right at an intersection.

So, I decided to hit the road and go for it. Though it was cloudy, it was no longer snowing. When I got off the freeway, the roads got progressively worse as I approached my destination, but they weren't that bad. Most had been cleaned off at least once. The rest were so cold that they were just hard packed snow and not ice, so it wasn't that slick. As I approached the hash, no one was on the road behind me, so I slowly approached the hash and took a screen shot when the first four decimal points were correct for both latitude and longitude. I quickly got out of my car, put my thermometer on the side of the road, and snapped a couple pictures. My thermometer is not digital, so it takes awhile to get to the correct temperature if it switches environments quickly. So I left it for twenty minutes, went and cleaned off my windshield, and came back. It said 9°F/-12.8°C. That was pretty close to a -12.5°C I'd seen from somebody on the Wiki a few days ago. I decided to go to the nearby town, get some food, and read some chapters I needed to read for school. A few hours later, around 10pm, I went back and placed the thermometer. I then drove to the town and back to give the thermometer time to acclimate. When I came back, it read -2°F/-18.9°C. I took a picture. Not knowing how good that one would turn out, I put it directly in my car lights to get a better picture. It was so cold that in just that amount of time, my body heat and the car's heat already warmed it up a degree! All in all, a good geohash: pretty snow covered land, a record, and success! About the only thing that could be better would be meeting somebody else geohashing when it gets warmer again!