The latest winter storm is now finished and we are now buried in snow. We are used to getting snow, but 20+ inches overnight is a bit excessive for us. I spent yesterday shoveling snow and then sled riding with the family, but today I left the house early and headed to my favorite spot, Ohiopyle State Park. Even though I go there quite often, things are always a bit different, especially with multiple feet of snow. My first spot was Cucumber Falls to try and get there before it got crowded.
While the past few weeks in south-west Pennsylvania has been quite frigid, today it warmed up just a bit and the sun made an appearance. This made for a nice hike around Ohiopyle. Having read that Cucumber Falls was totally frozen over, I decided to take a trip down to the Cascades as well as Jonathan Run Falls since I have never been to those in winter. Both of those were almost all iced up as well.
For this trip, I packed very light since I wanted to test out my new Fuji 18-135mm lens. I left my primes at home, which made for a compact and lightweight kit. Basically all I had was the X-T1, 18-135mm, Variable ND Filter, batteries, memory cards and my Benro Travel Angel tripod. Everything seemed to work great and even though the lighting was rather harsh (due to the time of day and a cloudless sky), the pictures were what I was hoping for. I am ready for it to warm up and for Spring to arrive.
I realize that asking this question is bound to bring on an apocalyptic snowstorm, but it’s something I’m missing. I’d like to go out and hike in the snow, maybe some biking and of course some picture taking. I want like 3 feet of shut down everything snow. Since this doesn’t seem as if it’s going to happen, I just had to go back through my archives and dig up some images of the last big snowstorm. So here they are. These were are all taken in and around Ohiopyle a day after a snowstorm dumped multiple feet of snow on top of even more snow back in February 2010.
Getting down to Cucumber Falls meant that we had to scale a 4 foot high wall of snow and then trudge through 3 feet snow that no one has been through yet. Fun times!
There were some massive icicles hanging off of the walls. Not something to be walking under.
The falls were mostly frozen over, but some water was coming down.
Here is how we had to get back to the road.
I guess I’ll have to wait a big longer for the snow. All I see in the forecast is rain and gloom.