Back in my treasure hunting days I would go high up in the mountains looking for gold. I would be camping and had a pickup truck and a small camping trailer. Inside that old little camping trailer was a small ice box mounted under the sink. When I went camping, I would put blocks of ice in the ice box. That worked well and the ice would last three or four days until it had all melted. One day a mountain storm moved in is so quickly it was all I could do to get back to my camping trailer. Graupel fell from the clouds and blew around in every direction. It piled up about two inches deep on the ground as I watched it from inside my camper. Already being camping there about two days my ice was almost gone. After the storm let up, I would go out and pick up large handfuls of graupel and put in my ice box. After a few times the ice tray was packed completely full of graupel. That graupel lasted for two weeks in my ice box before it all melted away. I was and still am amazed on how that could be. I wondered if in the pioneer days the pioneers there would do as I did and put the graupel into their cooling boxes.
