One of my friends and several of her students, with whom I tele ski, have been to Antartica a couple of times. They’re really into winter.
I love the contrast of long nights and bright-sun-on-the-snow-days. I love coming into a warm home after snowshoeing in the woods. I love kicking and gliding along miles of winter trails, quitely zipping along as I pass animal tracks. I love the exhilaration of speeding down steep alpine runs on my tele skiis, the wind roaring against me. I love sweating in a sauna until I can take no more heat, and then running outside and rolling naked in the tingling snow. I love warm soup and warm fresh bread at the end of a cold, hard day. I love curling up in bed with my cat, listening to the snow being blown across the roof. I love winter – so alive, so intense!
…and in cold weather, as long as you don’t do something stupid like walk out into the cold with not enough clothes, at most you’ll just be uncomfortable. In either case (not enough water, not enough clothes), you will die if you do something stupid.
When I was a kid, we lived in a house that had a creek running through the backyard. My Dad put lights out, and evey winter, we would skate on the creek (it had been dammed near our house and was over 6 feet deep with no rocks near us) in the moonlight, with the dim garden lights showing us the paths through the yard. It was magic. My friend and I would sit on the snowbanks and talk about Life and what Santa might bring us… In the daytime, we would skate up the creek to the golf course and explore. Or we would go sledding down our long hill or to a special hill that was steep and fast (not too many of those here in the prairie state!). We were soaked through and cold when we got home, but there was always hot cocoa and marshmallows and we would then pop corn in the fireplace–wonderful memories.
I remember a few years ago, cross country skiiing up in Wisconsin, over a lake and watching the birds and small creatures as they went about finding food on the shore.
I like to wear sweaters; I like to feel the cold air on my face and come in to a hot meal and warm couch. I’m so glad it’s winter!
If you are active in the deep freeze, watch out for frostbite on the tip of the nips and the tip of the tinkler (and more mundane places like finger tips, nose, and facial cheeks).
You remind me of the first time I met the former neighbor ladie’s now husband. It’s winter and somebody in shorts is knocking at my door. No socks, shoes, or shirt, and it’s about 15F out. He walked out the door to get something and got locked out. He wanted to call the girl friend to be left back in. I sent him to the neighbor next to me, because she actually had a phone. I told him if she wasn’t home he’d have to wait in my house so he didn’t freeze to death. The neighbor was home like I expected, so she had to shelter hime until the girl friend got home. Idiot. Never walk out the door unless you have keys on you in the winter.
And if you run for exercise–running while it’s snowing is one of the most fun things I’ve ever done–your hair may snap off at the ends-frozen from your sweat.
Here you have steep hills all over, so most towns had a good sleding hill. Portage has a glacial kettle, that was the prefered hill. Think of a kettle as sleding down the crater of a volcano. I occasionaly tobogganed in the country, where some of the runs were over a mile long, but that’s not as fun as it sounds, since you have to spend 30 minutes walking back up the hill. In the 80’s I found through a work friend that by Black Earth a farmer set up something to hall kids back up a step hill on his property, that you paid $5 a day to sled at. That would have been worth the money. The hill looked great.
That sounds magical. We usually had a skating rink in our backyard, too (my dad flooded our garden).
We had to toboggan down the sides of the local dugouts to get any proper hills where I was raised in Saskatchewan. They were a little dangerous; you had to be sure to stay off of them once the ice in them started to get rotten in spring.
This has been a very strange winter. Here in Central Oregon, we’ve only had two semi-decent snows, but neither was more than two inches. Yesterday, it was warm enough to open the house up and air it out, and today I’m wearing shorts. Supposedly we might get some snow later this week, but I’m betting it’ll turn out just like all the other snow we were forecast to have earlier- it’ll be rain.
I shall now be a prick and point to my “Location” line.
We don’t get people freezing to death in February, *NOR * do we get people heatstroking to death in August, either.
Mind you, it’s lovely to visit Vermont in early March. That was sweet. To visit. But it felt like Ben and Jerry could get the ice cream directly out of the cow, during the time I was there…
I was hoping for a thread like this. The building I live in, according to some of the long time locals, used to be a cannery and then a warehouse before it was remodled into el cheapo apartments. It wasn’t designed as an apartment building. For heat I have a single, ineffecutal electric baseboard heater. I can’t believe it’s more than 50F-55F in here right now. Yesterday I put a jar of salsa on my window sill behind my curtians to keep it cool. It froze after a few hours.
This morning I woke from the chill at about 4:30 am so, I went online to check the temperature. It was -20F at 4:56AM CST according to weather.com, wind chill put it at -32F. I know because I made a screen print of it and turned it into a PDF.
I have a nice view of the mighty Chippewa River from my apartment. It’s been fun the last few days watching the steam rolling off of it as the ice slowly creeps across its expanse. It’s still not completely iced over yet, but I think one or two more days of sub-zero temps will seal the last of the open water. Go ice! Go! Go! Go!
I just checked the temp again it’s currently -12F. I’m snug as a bug in many layers of clothes and blankets. Who was it that wrote that on cold winter nights you feel like a tiny ember glowing in the dark - or something like that? Jack London maybe? That’s how I feel now.
Yeah, but with regards to hot weather, I suspect you have to be a little more culpable and have to actually go out of your way to do something really dumb if you plan on croaking. Each year, most cases of heat deaths in the Australian summer (apart from the likes of a handful of very weak, elderly people who were likely to check out anyway) tend to be folks (often European or Japanese tourists) who ventured out into the outback without proper planning. And I’m sure the same could be said for the Canadian interior in winter.
But in a scenario more familiar to the average urban-environment Schmoe, say a quick jaunt down the street to the liquor store, it’s virtually impossible to become a statistic due to the heat, but the impression I get from this thread is that it’s relatively much easier to fatally screw up in extreme cold conditions, and the level of stupidity involved need not be as high.
You’ve got me thinking about this, now. We do everything we can to avoid a situation where we find out how long we can live in the cold, so now I’m wondering. I know that there is a danger to drunks and homeless people in winter - sleeping outdoors or passing out outdoors can both kill you.
If you drive your car between cities/towns and have a breakdown and there is no traffic or nearby houses, you could die in your car from exposure if you’re there long enough, or you could die from trying to walk if there is no one close enough.
A child or senile senior will occasionally get out of the house in winter and wander away - that can end in death if the wanderer isn’t noticed and brought back in soon enough.
If your furnace stops working, your ambient temperature will certainly drop eventually; you’re still protected from the elements, but if you stay in an unheated house, I think that will eventually kill you.
Getting wet is avoided like the plague in winter, because any exposure is made exponentially worse by being wet. Falling through rotten ice takes your body heat away incredibly fast.
You can be killed by avalanches in the mountains (actually, I think these happen a lot more than people realize). That’s more from suffocating than exposure, though.
That’s just the deaths that can occur; loss of toes, fingers, tip of nose and ears from frostbite is much more likely. I don’t think there’s a Canadian alive who hasn’t had a mild case of frostbite in their lives. Walking from your car to the nearest farmhouse when your car breaks down on the highway probably won’t cost you your life, but it might cost you a couple of toes if the walk is too long, and you have improper footwear. There’s another cultural thing, though - if there is traffic on the road, someone will stop and help you. No doubt in my mind about it. We all know that the consequences for not helping a stranded motorist are bad in winter.
I just realized that I’m talking about Western Canada - I would have to assume that if you go further north, you get worse consequences easier.
Actually, I thought that most deaths from hypothermia come, not in bitter cold, but in conditions that are both cold and damp–I mean like in the 40s or even 50s. I don’t have his book on hand, but Bill Bryson in his book, A Walk in the Woods devotes a whole chapter to hypothermia.
It’s 9 here now and snowing like the Dickens-it’s so gorgeous outside. I’m going out later to shovel (this is actually what I call Colorado snow–it’s dry and powdery, very unusual for the Midwest. We usually get the so called “heart-attack” snow–heavy and wet and the out of shape guys go out and shovel it and keel over…). We supposed to get 2-6 inches; we are probably at 3-4 right now. Featherlou --it was magical. Looking back, they are some of the best memories of childhood I have. I was so glad to move from Florida, where I was always hot and cranky. Here at least, I’m only hot a few months of the year!
To all those in Oz–come on up–I think you’d like the snow and cold.
My Wife and I live near the top to the continental divide. I hear a couple of avalanches a year. I suspect they are a few miles away. It’s kind of a hoooWHOOOOMP type of sound.
That avalanche sound is one of the most frightening sounds I have ever heard. I saw and heard one once out in Banff. Watched it in slow-motion, it seemed, but it was over in a heartbeat.
I may have to wear socks, people. It’s in the low 20s, and calling for teens and snow overnight.
It’s always been my understanding that far more deaths from exposure comes from drunk snowmobilers and hunters than anything else. There’s something about snowmobiling that just takes people’s brains away.
Of course, I might have this impression because I’m from somewhere where there are far more snowmobilers than homeless people and things generally aren’t as extreme as Canada.
But it felt like Ben and Jerry could get the ice cream directly out of the cow, during the time I was there…