mortonfox | Local Snowcaching (Reply)

The weather system dumped quite a bit of snow on the area Thursday night and temperatures never got above freezing on Friday. So there was still a lot of snow (and snow/ice-covered roads) on Saturday. I decided it wasn't a great day to travel out very far and tried my hand at finding geocaches in the snow within New Castle County. Some, like the banana and the idol, were still pretty easy to find despite the snow. The banana was, by sheer luck, in the only spot in the woods that was sheltered from the snow. "A Hard Cache for You", on the other hand, lived up to its name. It's a micro cache on the ground, so to find it, I pretty much had to shovel snow all around the cache site until finally, I got it out. Anyway, despite the tough geocaching and slick roads, it was a good day to go out and the snow made for a change in scenery.

On Sunday, I went to the Chester/Delaware County border area, specifically Tredyffrin, Berwyn, Radnor, and St. Davids. This area actually seemed a bit more dangerous because there were some winding and hilly country roads that were made even more icy by the freezing rain overnight. With a little care though, my car didn't skid. I tried to pick geocaches that I thought would be easy in the snow. However, "Willow Lake TB Hotel" at Eastern University turned out to be surprisingly difficult because that area by the lake had a smooth layer of snow and the cache was not where I thought it would be from the description and logs. (GPS readings were a bit flaky in that area too, which didn't help matters.) My only recourse was to shovel snow speculatively in a number of places until I got it. The best part of the day was a walk on the snowy Radnor Trail for 3 geocaches. With no one else using the bike path, it was very quiet.