COUDERSPORT — The Fourth Annual Snow Fest will be in the Coudersport Area Recreation Park at 7 Woodlawn Avenue off Seventh Street from noon to 3 p.m. Feb. 24.
Activities are free for adults and children of all ages.
If there is enough snow, there will be sledding, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. If it is cold enough to allow borough employees to create a rink in the park, there will also be ice-skating. Children and adults are asked to bring their own equipment. A limited number of snowshoes, cross-country skis and ice skates will be available to borrow and use at the park during the snow fest.
New this year is the Snow Fest 5K Run/Hike. Entry and waiver forms can be picked up, completed and dropped off at the Coudersport Elementary School at 802 Vine St. and at the Coudersport Borough Office at 201 S. West St. through Feb. 23.
“Registration will also be in the main pavilion beginning at 12 p.m. on the day of the event,” said Adam Clinger, organizer. There is no entry fee. Everyone will participate for free.
The 5K will start at 1 p.m. near the main pavilion. The 3.1-mile out-and-back course will be well marked and easy to follow, and people will be stationed along the 5K to ensure no one gets lost. The runners and hikers will follow a trail that starts in the park, and goes by the Coudersport Mobile Home Park and Coudersport Reservoir where they will turn around and head for the finish line near the main pavilion. Prizes will be awarded in two categories, children 12 and younger and adults, 13 and older.
A geocaching trail with five hidden caches will provide fun and excitement for adults and children who want to give geocaching a try or are already hooked. Bill Daly, a geocaching enthusiast, will be in the main pavilion with sample caches (containers) and pamphlets on geocaching. He will also have global positioning system (GPS) units available for people to use at the park. Those who own GPS units are encouraged to bring them. A PowerPoint program will walk beginners through geocaching. It will be running continuously on a television set indoors in a building next to the main pavilion.
“It should take between 30 minutes and an hour for participants to find all five caches,” Daly said. Participants will be within walking distance of the pavilion. “Find out how easy and fun it is to not only use a GPS unit, but to also go geocaching, a high-tech treasure hunt for all ages.”
Returning to demonstrate his trebuchet will be Coudersport Borough Councilman Brian Ruane who is also the president of Potter County’s Habitat for Humanity.
The trebuchet will be set up in the baseball field next to the main pavilion with announcements made as to when and in what direction it will be fired.
Ruane and four of his employees at Northern Tier Trading Company at 239 Route 6 in Coudersport built the trebuchet to use during the first Snow Fest held in 2015. He has demonstrated it at every snow fest since.
“My trebuchet is 16 feet long and about 12 feet high,” he said. “It takes three people to operate it. One person sets the trigger, another holds the boom and the third loads the potato. A counterweight is used to fling the potato we put on the trebuchet’s swinging arm.”
“We realized pretty quickly that we could not use the trebuchet to throw snowballs because it fires with so much velocity that the centrifugal force blows the snowball apart,” Ruane said.
“So instead of snowballs, the first year we filled balloons with water and tried shooting them. The water froze so we were actually shooting ice balls. One of them almost hit the scoreboard. We were asked if we could shoot something else that would not damage anything it happened to hit.
“That’s when we went to Plan B and first used potatoes. We continue to use them today,” he said, noting that the trebuchet is a machine designed in the Middle Ages to destroy castles. “When we shot the first potato, we forgot to recalibrate the counterweight. It was set at three pounds because of the ice balls. The potato we used was the size of a softball and probably weighed about six ounces. It sailed about half a mile. We now shoot each potato a distance of 100 yards, about the length of a football field.”
Mary and Larry Hirst and other members of the Potter County Bird Club will be at the interactive winter bird feeding display to introduce interested youngsters and adults to the basics of identifying birds that visit backyard feeders. They will talk about the different types of bird feeders and birdseed and show youngsters how to make a treat using peanut butter and a pine cone that they can take home for the birds in their backyards.
Andy Kulp, Andy’s mom Betty Jean Kulp and Dawn Mahon will be selling hot dogs, chili, hot cocoa, coffee and water with the proceeds to benefit the To Fill a Backpack program “to send elementary and high school students to school with the supplies they need.”
Anyone is welcome to set up an outside booth or to do a demonstration. For more information, call the borough office at (814) 274-9776.
