Coldest weather I’ve experienced was a night it went down to -23F. That’s Come to Jesus kind of weather. You worry what would happen if the furnace went out.
Most snow I’ve experienced was the Valentine’s Day blizzard in 2007. 18" of snow where I was, which didn’t sound like a lot, but it drifted up to six feet and the roads were closed–as in the police say that if you’re driving, there’d better be blood or fire–for two days. I was housesitting during that week, and I had a cozy time alone with lots of provisions laid in.
Turns out, it wasn’t the valve. It was the intake line where it connects to the tank, that was leaking onto the valve. Nine dollars later, I’ve fixed it.
The deep sink drain, and the cold water to it and the washing machine, are still frozen.
My coldest real-weather experience was around 19 degrees one winter camping near Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley.
I visited the International Antarctic Center in New Zealand–they have a “polar room” where you can suit up and get hit with -15 wind chill. I was in and out of there in less than a minute…brrrrrrrrr!!
Hm, lesseeeeee.
Coldest I ever winter camped in - about neg 20F in Canada with my dad and brother, wasn’t over snowy just really really cold - he was teaching us winter camping and survival techniques. Learned to make a snow cave, learned to shelter inside a treeline and scrounge for squawood, learned to make an actual igloo [a bunch of his Boy Scouting buddies showed up with more kids and decided to do a full on igloo raising, serious fun though not something one would do while actually stranded. Though it was pointed out to me that staying IN the vehicle isn’t always the best choice because plows and other vehicles can hit the vehicle you were traveling in.]
Worst blizzard I ever got stuck in - nonstarter, I have driven through an east coast paralyzing blizzard though =) I went from Rochester NY to Springfield OH. In my defense, I left work and headed to my BF of hte times’s place in Springfield and the weather was fine when I left. It started snowing by the time I hit Buffalo [well not literally] by the time I hit Cleveland and headed south towards Akron it was 8 hours into a 6 hour drive, and it was me, the cops and the plows on the interstate. By the time I headed west at Columbus, I was getting stopped by cops every hour or so and passed along because I was proceeding along just fine [really slow and carefully, but doing just fine] All in all, a 75 mustang isn’t the best winter vehicle, but heavy, stable and durable. I learned to pack out for winter - I had an arctic weight Army snowsuit, full sized shovel and an entrenching tool, 2 sets of expanded metal grating in case I needed traction, a 20 pound bag of sand for both weight and traction, Dad’s old Army down filled arctic weight sleeping bag and both 2 woobies [ok, poncho liners] and 2 shelter halves and about 200 feet of paracord, a couple spools of 500 lb fishing line] a solid fuel stove [yay c rations =] and a case of c-rations and assorted other goodies [chocolate, instant soups of all sorts thoguh mainly Liptons chicken noodle soup and instant beverage powder [ok, tang and hot chocolate powder] and an old mess kit for cooking and melting snow in, and an empty canteen, and a number of those Jewish candles in glass jars. ] No longer have the army suit [I have a bright orange Navy one now] nor the down sleeping bag [it sprang a terminal leak so I replaced it with a new synthetic one] and it is MREs instead of surplus c-rats. And I now travel in either an SUV I bought from my brother’s estate, or a momvan. If I travel in the momvan, I tend to leave the back row and one of the midrow seats down and set up an army cot along one side, and slide my traveling supplies in plastic totes underneath so I can sleep in the van.
[And for those who wonder about the woobies, I routinely sleep with my window open and lately with the weather just south of Rochester NY that means that the average night temp in my bedroom hovers around 40F. My only blanket right now is a woobie. The furnace died a few nights ago and I wouldn’t have noticed if our roomie hadn’t come and told me. ]
I try not to do stupid shit, so I don’t overly worry about it. I will take care of people and animals, when I learned the furnace crapped out, I spent the rest of the night tending the wood stove in the family room to keep Baby from becoming a conure-cicle. I will absolutely refuse to work in unsafe weather conditions - it would have to be an absolute emergency [ like nailing up plastic over a broken window, or physically moving animals - I once had to move chickens into the barn by picking them up and carrying them in, there was a wasp nest under the steps in and each hen I carried in earned me 3 or 4 wasp stings every trip in and out.
Hm, fun stuff - I guess the winter hubby was deployed and for 3 months until he got back I lived in the living room of the house in CT and heated the room, and my wash water with the wood stove because the furnace crapped out. THe heater tape kept the cold water pipes from freezing.
Years ago Kansas City had an “October Surprise”, meaning an early ice storm. This is bad because in October trees still have leaves and an ice storm means the tree branches catch and hold more ice and then, they break and … Oh Man… what a mess! Power lines down everywhere. One year our area was down for a week. Good thing my parents house had a backup wood stove in the basement.
Last year the Boy Scouts did the Klondike Derby and it got down to 11 degrees. But, the boys handled it pretty well and had fun. Not me though. I hate having to pee in the middle of the night and having to crawl out of a warm sleeping bag to walk up the hill to an outhouse, in the dark and cold. This year I’m bringing a jug or something.
Do you remember the date? Was it October 8th? I’m in Topeka, not that far away, and I remember the early October ice storm on that date. One street around the corner from me wasn’t passable for three days, so many branches broke off into the street. Lots of downed power lines too, because of branches falling on them. The city was pretty much shut down for two days. And you were right, nobody expected it. I remember one weatherman, the night before, saying “I have two words for you, no accumulation.” Boy, did he ever come in for some ribbing.
Last year we had two feet of snow everywhere in my neighborhood, including the street. I nevertheless looked both ways before crossing. That’s how ingrained the habit is.
Back in April 1997, it was one of my closest friend’s birthday parties, at a club on the other side of the city. All week, the weather forecast was calling for a snow storm, but that do that pretty often in Winnipeg. I did call her to cancel, but she was so sad, so Paula and I decided to brave it.
Winnipeggers will note, this was the Blizzard of '97, which led to the Flood of the Century. When we left the bar at close, it was sheer insanity, but because we were young and crazy, we decided to go for it. As luck would have it, her tiny little Ford Escort not only had winter tires, but was also light enough to sit on top of the snow. We stopped three times to pick up other stranded motorists. We carefully avoided several half-buried 4X4s and pick-ups. Our only mistake? To get to my house, you had to u-turn. That’s where we finally got stuck. About 200 feet from my house.
Around 2 days later, the road was cleared enough she could make it home.
Coldest I can ever remember was my junior (or possibly senior) year of high school, I had about a 1.75 mile walk and the morning temperature was -8 with a wind chill of -33. My mom bundled my brother and I up as much as she could and sent us out. By the time we got to our ‘halfway station’ (where we met up with some other friends), well, their mother took one look at us and backed the car out of the drive and drove us the rest of the way. Still remember that cold 45 years later.
Have spun out in ice and snow several times in my life, most memorably was driving back from my brothers’ wedding in Illinois (NW of Chicago) to Indianapolis. I was driving down I-65 at about 30MPH due to snow, ice and wind, and still lost it and spun out into the median, which at this part of the road slanted downward into a gully between the lanes. I joined several other cars there, and some opportunistic tow truck folks made a killing that day hauling us back to the road. Finally got home, but that’s another trip I’m not planning on repeating in this lifetime.
It’s was 51F here Friday morning.
I panicked when I thought about looking for my sweater. I haven’t seen it in months.
Luckily it warmed up when the sun came up.
It was scary, I thought I was going to have where shoes and long pants.:smack:
The thing about tele skis is that you have to take care to not go nose over tea-kettle when hitting deeper snow. C. figured that out a milli-second too late when we were skiing into a gully that had collected a lot of powder. She drilled in up past her hips – face first.
Holy shit le merde! There we were digging beside her and and pulling her by the legs, frantic to get her out before she asphyxiated, but once we got her out, we wondered if there was any way we could stuff her back down the hole. Her trusty fight or flight reflex had quite rightly kicked in when she thought she was going to die, or to be more correct, her fight reflex kicked in.
The there was M. who tried to slow down on a very narrow trail (4-5 ft wide) before a steep right angled chicane. He moved one ski into the unpacked but thick snow, which caused him to spin out, tearing an abductor in the process – one hell of a way to slow down.
He screamed and puked for a while, and then we discussed how to get him back to the trailhead (about 10km away). We figured our best bet would be to send a couple of us ahead to the trailhead to then drive to a phone and call in a long-bed snowmobile, while the rest of would hump him down to the base of the trail, build a quinsy, and wait.
He kept saying “fuck that!” and insisted that once we carried him through the chicane that he would ski the rest of the way on one ski. And much to our amazement, he did just that – screaming and dry heaving all the way. One hell of a tough son of a bitch.
Since then he has asserted that the pain of skiing out was worth it to avoid the wrath of his wife for not returning home on time.
Not the coldest I ever experienced, but mildly amusing: I was visiting a friend in Edmonton for New Year’s Eve and I left a bottle of amaretto and a bottle of rye whiskey in my trunk overnight. The amaretto froze solid, but the rye was only 95% frozen. We considered drinking the remaining 5%, but we decided to let it thaw out first.
A friend of a friend of mine was doing some kind of winter road maintenance in Saskatchewan and another guy on the work crew was from Newfoundland. The Newfoundlander was concerned about working in Sask. in the wintertime, but his friend assured him that Saskatchewan has a “dry cold” so it wouldn’t be that bad. But on the first day of work he shook his first at the sky and shouted out: “F**k you, dry cold!!!”
I had a telemark race in Penticton, and a course to teach in Sudbury two days later, about a 40 hour drive. At the time, I was driving a Suzuki Samurai, which was truly a hoot to drive on snow, but not big enough to sleep in, so I was in the habit of sleeping in my ski-box trailer (that’s why God invented 3/4 inch plywood and 3/4 inch closed cell foam.
So there I was, halfway home from the race, comfortably ensconced in my mobile hobbit hut in a Brandon parking lot when I heard a loud BEEP – BEEP – BEEP of a dumpster truck picking up a dumpster. My very sleepy reptilian hind brain had a thought, and not a particularly good one at that. It thought – I thought – that I was in the dumpster that was being picked up, so in a blind terror I tried to kick my way out of my ski-box, to no avail. It took me almost a minute – an interminably long minute – to realize that I was safe and comfy and warm in the prairie winter, and that the dumpster had no interest at all in eating me.
Later that day I drove through a cold patch between Dryden and Upsala that was too cold for my rag-top, it’s puny heater, even with using my winter bag as a duvet. By the time the air had warmed up closer to Thunder Bay, I was sorely tempted to stop for a sauna at the Kangas, but I was on a tight schedule to make it back to Sudbury on time for the class, so come TBay I filled up with gas and shiverrrrrred on east.
I made it to the English lit class with about twenty minutes to spare. Yay!
A few of the students had not prepared for it. No surprise there. Boo!
That was one of the primary reasons I changed my profession – wanting to work with people who are invested in the task at hand rather than floating through life. It’s remarkable how being very, very cold tends to focus one.
These stories are great – really put the merely-zero shoveling I’ve done today in perspective.
Our scout troop held a “Freeze-a-roo” every January. Being Wisconsin, it got frigid. But being Awesome Scouts we were prepared… we built igloos with branches and snow, insulated with leaves. And we built all the igloos in a circle facing a big fire pit. Worked great!
Cross-country skiing to work, across a frozen lake, sounded like a great idea … until a storm came up and the temp plummeted. Nearly passed out but managed to stumble into a lakeside hotel (the clerk just threw a blanket on me where I laid and went back to his work, and when I asked him how he could be so casual with me shivering uncontrollably, he said “Eh, I’ve watched a lot of friends go through hypothermia…”)
It was 24 below (F) and a coworker and I had to drive the flats of our newspaper to the printer, a distance of about 12 miles. I was supposed to do it, but my car wouldn’t start. Her car started but had no functional heater. So we loaded up with mugs of hot chocolate, all bundled up in our winter coats, and set off. It was only 12 miles, we figured it would take us about 20 minutes, which it did.
By the time we got to the printer, any of our hot chocolate we hadn’t drunk was frozen in the bottom of the mugs. We went inside the print shop and said, “You know, usually we just drop these off and leave. But tonight we need to warm up a bit.” The printer guy said fine.
It was a good thing we stayed. The car was so cold that all the wax, which was holding the copy to the flats, had released its grip, and we essentially had to remake the entire paper but at least the light-tables were warm.
Then we had to drive back.
A week later (it was warmer, but still pretty damn cold) my coworker quit and moved to Arizona.
Always bring the booze in. Basic rule of prairie winter survival.
Eh, it all depends on what you’re used to. One of the coldest I’ve ever been was during a snow storm on Signal Hill overlooking St John’s Harbour in late April. Cold, wind, snow, and wet.
We didn’t hang along much longer than needed to tick off one more box on the list of “Iconic Canadian Places to See Before You Die.”
We thought if we stayed much longer than we did, our list of “Iconic Canadian Places to See Before You Die” might actually be rather short. :eek:
On January 24, 1963, I was a senior in high school and it was –19 degrees that morning. It was so cold, the car wouldn’t start, so I had to walk over a mile to school. I remember being so frozen I couldn’t move my face. In a school of over 3,000 kids, only about a hundred showed up, plus a handful of teachers. All-day study hall. (The day’s high was 1 degree.)
