I think it’s kind of like visiting the home you grew up in after not having seen it for 20 years. That sledding hill that was a near vertical drop for 100 yards turns out to be a little hump in the landscape.
ARGH! -30°F. I swear I am going to have to see about therapy for my dyslexia – is there any treatment nowdays? Somedays, I swear I have completely no control over what my fingers actually type after my brain says “type xyz.” (Or in this case “type -30°F!”)
Utah in December and Minnesota in February. It may or may not have been the coldest ever (I grew up on the East Coast), but it felt like it, since I was coming from San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, respectively, almost ten years after I’d moved west.
This is true. Air that is really cold is very dense and usually found at the center of large high pressure systems. Extreme cold and wind like right now in Calgary is very, very rare.
I remember groing up ini Wisconsin waiting for the school bus when the temerature was in the minus twenties.
I don’t know if today’s Calgary temps are the coldest I’ve ever been in, but they certainly rank up there (down there?) with the coldest I can remember. Bitter cold, and though the wind has died down a bit from yesterday, it’s still blowing enough to make for a very uncomfortable wind chill.
I don’t need the car until later today, but the first thing I did this morning was to plug in its block heater. I tried the engine four hours later, and it started just fine. I let it run for about 20 minutes and shut it down, but I’ll keep it plugged in until I need it.
I was going to ask if that was December 1989 but the best Googling I was able to do (admittedly slim) turned up -20F without windchill as the low for that month. I swear I heard the windchill was -50 or something like that. I had to go outside for classes/finals, and wore two pairs of jeans with thermal underwear underneath (and my legs were still cold), multiple layers on top under my winter jacket, and wrapped my scarf around my face to try to protect my skin. My now-husband who was also there tore a thin layer of skin off small spots on his face when he removed his sunglasses - the metal had frozen to his skin from the moisture on his face, and taking off his sunglasses outside had a painful side effect.
I suspect the low temps I dealt with in Minneapolis 4-5 years later might have been worse, but don’t know for certain. I do remember leaving my car running in a Target parking lot because I wasn’t sure it would start upon my return if I didn’t - and saw anywhere from a quarter to a third of the other cars in that lot were left running as well.
I went to a night game at Candlestick Park. That was the coldest I’ve ever been.
I went to Chicago on my spring break once in college (don’t ask) and it was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. I’m from New England so I’m used to cold but the wind or something there just made it the most intolerable cold I’ve ever experienced in my life. I have no idea if it was all that cold but I just remember not being warm for 2 weeks.
I also remember being peed on on the El by a bum, which also contributes to my hatred of Chicago.
Back at boarding school, I once had to run the annual intraschool cross-country race- “the Ledder”- in short shorts and a singlet. It was about -9 degrees Celsius, or 15.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Plus a wind chill.
Coldest weather I’ve been in at all was -20 degrees C (-4 F) in the Outer Hebrides in 1995ish.
-20F with high winds added in.
I grew up in Saskatchewan, so we were used to the cold - I think -45C or so was the record, before windchill. For some reason when I was in high school the ‘cool kids’ didn’t wear toques or mittens or anything, even at those temperatures, so frostbite was pretty common. I remember wearing great fuzzy mittens that my Mom knitted for me while waiting for the bus then quickly yanking them off and stuffing them in my bag when the bus was coming around the corner. I also remember standing at the bus stop with my sleeves pulled over my hands and my hands pressed against my ears, which I guarantee looked way cooler than wearing a hat would have!
Didn’t the bum pee at least make you warmer?
Your mother was a fast knitter, or your buses were extremely slow.
I haven’t lived in Fairbanks for a decade, my Mom tells me that winter temperatures are getting less extreme. But 50 below isn’t that anomalous for Fairbanks, it’s extreme but normal extreme.
But yeah, at 50 below things feel weird. Sounds travel strangely, everything is bone dry, you can do things like toss a glass of water into the air and have nothing come down except crystals. And of course, things like door handles breaking off, materials of all sorts get extremely brittle. And the ice fog. And of course, your car absolutely won’t start if it’s been outside in those temperatures. If you don’t have a garage you might as well forget it.
The only thing that makes it tolerable is that when it’s that cold it’s almost always absolutely still. But if you think about it it make sense. Wind is moving air. At 50 or 60 below you’re probably the coldest place in the hemisphere. If the air were moving it would be bringing in warmer air from someplace, because air from anywhere else would be warmer. It’s not that the cold brings stillness, it’s that whithout stillness you just can’t build up that intense of a cold.
Just after I left the womb, but before I saw the light of day.
Oh, come on, you know what I meant! Pick on my grammar skills, will you!
About -32, skiing out of a cabin in northern NH by the Canadian border. The snow felt like sandpaper on the skis; no glide but plenty of kick.
I’ve gone lift skiing at Jay (northern VT) and once at Killington when the summit temps were -25. It was very silly, I won’t do that again.
I once skied into a backcountry cabin at 20 below and the cabin was headed up to 85 degrees. My glasses didn’t unfog for an hour. 
Fellow Schoolie, are ya? (I’m Class of '91)
Anyway, I have a recollection of my mom and dad telling me it was -90 F with the wind chill factor, and I couldn’t go out and play because you could get frostbite in a few minutes in that weather. The Minnesota Climatology Working Group informs me that I’m probably conflating the reported wind chill in Northern MN with the local reports (or my parents were at the time), and that the wind chill calculation has changed since then. Between the two, I probably never experienced anything lower than -60 or so. Practically balmy!
About 8 F for a short period, about 25 for several hours at a stretch.
(yes, I’m from Texas! We should have a “Hottest temperature” thread too)
Seriously though; there’s a vast difference between temperatures that you’ve briefly gone out in, versus ones you’ve spent long periods out in.
For example, 27 degrees F isn’t particularly bad if you’re not out in it for a while, but you definitely have to dress differently if you’re planning to spend 6 hours outside in it.
Maybe we should specify the different temperatures that way.
I can usually tolerate cold pretty well, but when I went up to San Simeon, CA, a few years ago in January to see the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas, the wind chill on the bluffs overlooking the beach was so intense that I felt chilled right down to the marrow. It left me feeling exhausted.