That’s what it is outside my place right now (5:45 am) outside of Thunder Bay. A loud bang woke me about half an hour ago. I wonder if something contracted to much.
Fond memories of winter cross country skiing expeditions in the bowls of the Selkirks. If it got too cold, we’d abandon the tents for snow caves. We always managed find a way to each pack in a favorite bottle. Countless unmarked powder bowls.
Would probably be frowned on these days where snowmobiles do the carving, but we always loved to light a standing dead Spruce tree. Felt like a spiritual awakening watching 100’ branchy tree explode with light and heat.
Bottles appeared, wet clothing and gear shed and hung to dry, while two or three naked and slightly inebriated heathens carved turns in a brightly illuminated wilderness.
I prefer not to mix alcohol and cocaine myself, but other than that, sounds like good times! 
Actually, my little story does involve a drug, namely LSD. Twenty-plus years ago, last year of college, drove out to Brekenridge, Colorado from Chicago with a friend. Night skiing on acid, and it began to snow. Multicolored snowflakes. Beautiful.
But then had to drive in the dark through maybe four inches of newly fallen snow, on curvy mountain roads back to our lodging several miles away. I actually pulled it off well – I recall being super focused, not too worried, just enjoying the challenge of keeping us from falling off the cliffs.
(This post is not intended to endorse any behavior blah blah blah)
In Fairbanks, we called that “Wednesday”.
My sophomore year of college there were eight freshmen students from Hong Kong living on my dorm floor who had never seen snow before. There had been a few days with flurries that winter but we kept telling them that eventually the snow would stick. Then it came.
It started to build up and once there were a couple inches on the ground in the courtyard we dragged the Hong Kong students out to play in the snow. Silly kids stuff, building snowmen and making snow angels, led to a snowball fight that escalated to a few hundred students throwing snowballs at each other and at passing cars.
Then a pizza delivery driver started spinning his wheels coming up the hill behind the dorm. Students went and pushed him around in a couple donuts before righting him and sending him on his way. Much fun was had so they did it again with a passing car in front of the dorm, but that car wasn’t having problems.
By the time the police showed up our original group was inside, watching from our seventh floor vantage point. The police stopped in front of the dorm and the officer got out of his vehicle, leaving the engine running and his driver’s side door ajar. And upon noticing the arrival of the police one voice echoed across the courtyard, “What’s he going to do? Arrest us all?”
Things went a bit sideways from there. A student reached into the patrol car and pulled the gearshift into Drive before bailing out. The cruiser started to take off down the block with the officer chasing it to where it came to rest in a snowbank. And a very few minutes later many patrol cars showed up and the snowball fight was over.
That storm dumped more than 17 inches of snow overnight, closing the university. The Hong Kong students, much impressed, wanted to know if it was like this every time it snowed.
ROTFLMAO
Back in the day if we didn’t get 6 inches of snow overnight, we didn’t get a school day. I find it so damned funny that a half inch of snow can get school massively delayed and 2 inches can get it cancelled for the day. When I am in CT, I wear a wind breaker as a winter coat [though I keep a Navy survival suit in the back, just in case - I am not an idiot!] because IMHO they really don’t have winter to me, it rarely drops below 30F and snow doesn’t tend to stick around. Here in western NY I am finally feeling winter - the snow seems to be sticking, and we get flurries almost every day [less than half an inch, but it is sticking] I am almost wishing I knew someone who does ice fishing and has the little cabin because I could almost get into it right now, though I would be seriously missing my father and brother =(
The university in Fairbanks would not cancel classes until -65F. It was brutal walking to class even from a short distance most of the winter. By the time you got to class (assuming you could find your way through the ice fog), you had hoarfrost covering any exposed hair. At extreme cold, say -40F or worse, car oil freezes, gasoline turns to jelly, and bias tires freeze flat on the bottom. I remember students lighting small bonfires under their oil pans in the parking lot in a futile attempt to start their cars. Fairbanks is a true shit hole pretty much all year round.
The coldest temperature I ever experienced was in January of 1976. I was stationed for a time at Ft. Devens, MA. Don’t ever go there in winter, is my advice.
One morning it was -33 degrees. We had to march a mile, at 6:00AM, to a classroom. There we found there was no heat, the pipes had frozen. They sent us a bus to go back. I wa this close to frostbite. Dumbass sargeant, having us walk in that. It was icy as hell, too. I was in a temp barracks, with married families waiting for housing. My husband and I stayed for free, as he(a civlian) agreed to be the one who would get up in the middle of the night if a new family arrived late. One night he drove two parents and a kid to the base hospital. Kid had broken her arm and the folk’s car wouldn’t start, battery dead due to cold. I still think of that girl as a child, but she’d be in her upper forties now. Damn, time flies.
A friend of mine, back when he was in the navy, got to go down a couple of times to the south pole station in Antarctica.
What was interesting he said was the flight starts out in nice, sunny warm San Diego. He said it felt odd packing all that heavy winter gear while people were wearing shorts. There they fly across the pacific, make a couple of stops, and the last one is in I think New Zealand. Get south of there he said and it gets cold pretty fast even in a plane. Its heater only works so well so they were pretty cold by the time they got down there and he said when they open the door the cold just slams into you.
Two years ago working outside in 33° & snow, which means it stuck to us, gradually turned to slush before completely melting. Nothing was waterproof that day.
Last weekend stood in a 1½ hour flight at about 16°, but at least there was no wind. I’ve flown in colder.
What exactly were the circumstances for this? You seem to be saying you were flying in a totally unheated airplane.
Aircraft, not airplane. This one, specifically, & as you can see, it’s open.
I don’t camp in snow. That way lies madness. When we moved to Wyoming we stayed in our pop-up camper for a week before the house was ready. It was September but we still got caught in an early storm. 3-5 inches and high winds. Not fun but no big deal.
Not stuck, but plowed snow with the front bumper in a Plymouth Horizon for 40+ miles on the way back from a sporting event, again in Wyoming.
-40, not work, as in something I got payed for, but out shoveling during a snow, in Vermont this time. Thank goodness for Carhartt.
Probably the worst was the big ice storm that hit Michigan back in the 70s. We lived on 3 acres of pine woods. A little weird because they were all planted at once so the woods was in a grid pattern with rows and columns of trees. Over the night of the ice storm we lost 25-30 trees. Every half-hour or so there would be a thunderous crash as another tree got overloaded and went down. Nothing hit the house but it was pretty nerve wracking.
Well, from last winter’s deep freeze and heavy snow: the snow that dumped all over our city basically stranded us in our neighborhood. Really, there was no way to leave: one exit was piled high with snow that had hardened into a mountain of ice, and one became a hill of ice that plunged into an icy creek that would bottom out most cars and light trucks.
So we stayed homebound for a couple of days. And then came the call, at about 11 PM: some friends of ours, who had been in Dallas when the storm hit and were on their way back, had gotten stuck on the south side of town. Could I come and get them?
I dressed warm in case I got stranded too. I took my wife’s car, an SUV with four wheel drive and adequate clearance, and started making my way across the glass-slick roads of the city. Every time I gave it a nudge for speed, I felt the tires slip. The few drivers who had braved the city before me had broken up just enough ice to cause massive potholes, and in places I felt like I was driving on two wheels.
Slowly, with both hands firmly on the wheel, I crept toward my destination. I didn’t dare move my hands or take my eyes off the cruel road for an instant. As a result, I now have a deep hatred of Adele’s “Hello”, because it probably played eight or ten times on my journey.
It took almost two hours to cross the city. I got to where they had said they were, and they were nowhere to be seen. My phone had rung while I was driving, and of course I didn’t dare answer it, but in the relative calm, I called them back. “Oh,” they said, “a helpful redneck with a 4WD pickup pulled our car out, we’re good.” Great. Wonderful.
Another hour and 45 minutes, and I was home.
And, here’s another one of mine from years ago:
I’ve never been in a blizzard or winter storm. I work in an office and for the most part always have (I’ve had to work in the rain, though). I’ve never been in a situation where I felt like my safety was in jeopardy due to the elements. Having said that, my worst winter experience was just the night before last.
My son is in Boy Scouts and I’m an assistant Scoutmaster. In January they’re planning a big, district-wide campout in the snow so we decided to take our troop up to the mountains and do a bit of a dry run, testing equipment and skills. We have a 16’x8’ enclosed trailer that we use as a supply depot, so we hauled that up the mountains.
This is the Oregon Cascades, just outside of the north entrance to Crater Lake. ~20°f during the day, -10°f at night. We came from much further west where temps were much more mild. While we all were somewhat prepared, it was still a miserable experience. The snow was about 2 ½ feet deep and while we found a plowed area to park our cars and the trailer, the actual campsite was back in the woods a ways. We all slept in separate tents, and the tent I had was a tiny, one-man backpacking tent. The sleeping bag was warm enough but the sleeping pads were thin open-cell foam… maybe okay for sleeping on grass in the summer but woefully insufficient for sleeping on packed snow. It was hard and cold. I finally called it an night when I realized I was getting ice in my hair and beard every time I turned over: there was thin sheet of ice on the inside of my tent and bits were being knocked off onto me.
The overnight low in our campsite was -6°f, and it was -4°f when I woke up… well, “woke up” is a bit of a misnomer as I never really slept but rather tossed and turned all night trying to stay comfortable. We had neglected to bury our water jugs in a snowbank so we had no water yesterday morning. It was cold enough that my old carbureted engine with a who-knows-how-old battery barely started and the car’s small small, insufficient heater took 20 minutes to clear the ice off the windows—there was frost on the inside of the car as well. We ended up tossing all our gear haphazardly in the trailer at first light and hauling ass back down the mountain to the nearest open café where we could warm up and get some coffee.
The drive from the office in northwestern Ontario’s Manitouwadge to the motel in Marathon is usually an hour and a half, with an intersection and a mine site about halfway, but nothing else other than rocks, trees and water (and moose, bear, wolves, lynx, beaver, fox, sandhill cranes, and all the other denizens of the boreal forest). When there is a winter storm off Lake Superior, all bet are off as to how long the trip will take, if it can be completed at all.
Halfway to the intersection I came across a couple of clients who had left the office earlier that afternoon. One of them had stopped due to lack of visibility. Half an hour later, the other client (from a different matter) rammed him into the ditch due to lack of visibility. Fortunately, the rammer’s winch was not damaged, so problem solved.
By the time I was three-quarters of the way to Marathon, the trucks on the highway heading that way were all stopped. Not pulled off to the side of the road and stopped – just stopped in the westbound lane. Dozens of trucks, just nestled down for the duration.
The eastbound lane was clear of traffic because the highway had been closed earlier that day (the trucks in the westbound lane were the last to try to make it through before the closure), so I crawled along pad a very long line of trucks – well over a mile, and then kept on crawling, and crawling, and crawling through the void, eventually making it to the Marathon in the middle of the night. Later that morning, I came across my clients from different matters amicably having breakfast together. They had arrived in about half an hour after me, and were taking the collision and long, slow drive in stride.
You know, there’s something relaxing about crawling along in a storm.
During a bit of a blow one winter while slowly heading south out of Manitouwadge, Ontario, we came across a very large dog trotting into town. My passenger thought it was a wolf, but I wasn’t so sure.
A few seconds later, we found ourselves beside a wolf pack that was trotting down the road heading away from town. They kept pace beside us for about a minute or so.
To this day I still don’t know what the lone canine was. If it was a dog, why did the wolves not eat it? If it was a wolf, why was it going in the opposite direction from the pack?
It was a lone wolf.
It can be peaceful, driving through the snow at slow speeds, but also stressful if anyone passes you, or someone goes by in the other direction, and kicks up a lot of snow. Can be blinded temporarily and you just hope there’s no sharp curve just ahead.
That’s why we traded in our Acura sedan for a CRV - the extra height makes a world of distance when snow gets kicked up.
Never camped in snow. One time in April I did experience the worst of both worlds very close to each other. On the way to meet my family in DC for a vacation I camped in the Smokies and even though I stayed in a shelter I was shivering since there was a hard freeze overnight. No snow but there was ice on the trees that was bent by the wind. Then a couple days later I was in DC and its sweltering heat.
Worst blizzard: drove up to see my dad in Canandaigua and I drive through the night. When I hit Erie PA it starts to snow and it keeps getting worse as I approach Canandaigua. It was there that I see lots of vehicles that had slipped off the road – mostly SUVs oddly enough. I pull into a gas station only a couple miles from my dad’s and I call him and say I can’t get any further because the roads are snowed in. Halfway through the conversation I see a plow plowing through the road I’ll be taking so I tell my dad I have to go and tail the plow.