I can attest to all of this. I spent two years at the U of A in Fairbanks. It hit -62F at its coldest. Gasoline gels, oil freezes, very little moves unless it’s been in a heated garage. Tires go ‘square’ on you if you park your car for any length of time. If you go for a walk, within a few blocks all of your facial hair (eyebrows, eye lashes, etc.) and the front of the hair on your head is coated with a rime of frost from your breath condensing there. In the ice fog, you absolutely cannot see more than a few feet in front of you.
I stood in the melted snow in the arctic entry of my dorm while putting on mittens and scarf and parka hood that day, then walked outside. The extreme cold air momentarily took my breath away, and I could feel my nose hairs freezing. I stood there for about a minute trying to adjust to the cold. When I decided to start walking, I found that my wet shoe bottoms had frozen to the sidewalk.
I’ve experienced -40 on several occasions, and I’ll echo what the others have said: it hurts to inhale. I try to breathe shallowly, because taking a deep breath hurts. My mustache and beard turn into ice very quickly because of my breath freezing, and my nose runs incessantly.
I’ve been out at -20 F on horseback chasing an escaped bull. That’s pretty darned miserable. The horse wasn’t very happy about it, either. I ended up taking him in our heated garage (which was slightly above freezing), turning on a couple of space heaters, and giving him a big bucket of warm water and a big bucket of grain.
A temperature of -30C with no wind is much nicer than -15C with a 40-km/h wind. That feels like the skin on your face and hands is being flensed off with exacto knives. And that was during the hundred-metre walk from the bus stop to the apartment door.
Avoiding wind is why parkas have hoods that extend forward, completely close around the neck, and are edged with fur. The fur slows the wind down in front of your face so that the air next to your skin has a chance at being still.
For an account of the insanely brutal conditions during Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1914 read The Worst Journey In The World. They experienced temps of -75F with howling winds and no shelter. Frostbite and snowblindness were expected and death from hypothermia was a constant and real danger. Sadly, the entire team who went out with Scott did indeed succumb to the cold.
An excellent book that makes you want to curl up under a warm blanket while reading. Link is to the free Guttenberg version. Highly recommended.
The only qualifier to that is that there is a noticeable difference between -30F in a dry area like Fairbanks, and 0F in a wetter climate like Anchorage. It actually feels colder in the damper clime.
I reguarly go snowmobiling in -30C. I have all the proper gear and heated handlebars, so for the most part, it’s pretty pleasant.
Except for one area. If I don’t have my helmet goggles and my balaclava adjusted just right, wind penetrates in between the goggles/helmet/balaclava interface right onto the skin around my eyes, forehead and nose area.
-30C air when you’re doing 100 km/h or better is damn cold. Do it for longer than a couple of seconds and you get a nice frostbite on the exposed areas. Continue doing it (I’m almost home! I’m not slowing down!) and those frostbit areas will turn black and fall off and leave you with big scabs around your eyes and on the tip of your nose. The pain you feel when those frozen areas start to warm up is about 10x as painful as the initial frostbite and it lasts a lot longer. And then you look like a massive idiot for a couple of weeks.
The coldest that I can recall was -35F on a dogsledding trip in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. We slept, no tents, in sleeping bags rated to -60F with a thick foam pad underneath and an open bivy bag over the top. The air on exposed skin produced a sharp pain, like dipping a hand into near-scalding water or into an ice bath. The camp was dead quiet in the morning, and within ten minutes of people being up and around there was an ice fog from exhaled breath that formed a layer from around 3’ off the ground to around 7’ off the ground, which looked weird as hell in the raking light of dawn: sit down and you could look across camp and see legs poking out of a golden mist; stand on a sled and you could make out eddies and whorls of people moving just below the ‘cloudtop’. The air was otherwise perfectly still.
I’ve been out in temperatures of -24. However, there was no wind and I didn’t know it was that cold. I was oblivious to what I had exposed myself to. I’ve been out in weather that was not that cold but the experience was much worse. I have had the beginning of hypothermia in warmer but more hostile weather.
My rule of thumb is that when it get’s below zero F you need to be careful. Things can become very unpleasant very quickly and usually involves pain and/or numbness to any extremity that isn’t sufficiently insulated which is usually the face, the fingers and the toes.
I go by Jack London’s description. When your spit is cracking before it hits the ground you are in big trouble.
According to this page, temperatures in Central Park hit 1 degree Fahrenheit twice in January of 2004, and was in the single digits for eight days, so that must be the time he is thinking of. 1F is -17C, so he remembers pretty correctly.
Thanks for that, I’ve checked my photo time stamps and that was indeed it, it also says the winds were a brisk 20mph+ so that would explain why it was so uncomfortable (coupled with our lack of proper clothing)
Yeah - nth-ing responses from those in Canada/Alaska.
I’ve lived in MN my entire life - not as cold as some places, but -20 F days are a winter regularity here (if not colder), except for this winter it would seem.
For those of us “used” to below zero F temps, we can just feel it when you go outside and know it’s below zero without checking a gauge.
It sounds different, it smells different, and it’s almost always unusually bright and sunny (during the day). The snow sounds different under your feet. That first breath is literally breath-taking. You can feel icing immediately in your nose. Everything just feels stiff and sharp.
We having a saying in my house when it gets into the teens below zero and colder. It’s not just cold, it’s “stupid” cold out.