Give me a break. My quote is a direct reference (“The second claim isn’t even close to true”) to the poster in post #2. Also note that my post references only U.S. states. I’ve never made any claim that what I said applied to Canadian Provinces.
And I’ve got to disagree with the contention that there’s a drop-off at -20F. There’s a huge difference between 20 below and 40 below, and an even bigger difference between 40 below and 60 below. You can hike around at 20 below, and it’s damn cold, but if you dress appropriately and take appropriate precautions (ie, don’t sweat) you can do normal outdoor activities. When I was a kid, they didn’t cancel outdoor hockey games unless it was colder than 20 below.
At 40 below you just don’t wanna go outside unless you have to. That’s serious crazy cold. But, if you know what you’re doing you can go about your normal life.
And at 60 below, it’s just insane. It feels like another planet, I think mostly because things just don’t sound right. You can bundle up as much as you want and it doesn’t matter, the heat is just sucked out of you in a minute. It’s SCARY being outside at those temperatures. You don’t want to drive anywhere unless you absolutely have to, because if your car breaks down you could die, or lose your feet. And cars just aren’t designed for those temperatures. Gasoline turns to sludge, your motor oil turns to sludge, your tires are hard as rock, every metal or plastic part in your car is brittle.
But as they say, it’s a DRY cold. I’d rather spend the day outside at 10 below in Fairbanks, where it’s absolutely dry and almost always still, than 32F here in the Puget Sound with constant drizzle.
I really don’t see how this doesn’t include places other than the four you listed. Considering that you got mad at DoC for ‘moving the goalposts’, you’re doing quite a bit of it yourself.
I’m also kind of curious about how exactly he would prove to you that he called the weather service. Show you his phone bill?
Can I quote windchill if the wind was 75MPH?
One time skiing at Steamboat. We knew it was gonna be a cold-cold day, but it was the last time we would be up in a while and only a half day at that, so we went out anyway. Temp at base was 0, with mid mountain at -10. We bundled up in the heaviest stuff we had including full insulated face masks. We basically followed the lift operators up the mountain to get an early start. We got on the old trusty Bar-U-E and headed up storm peak.
Then Holy shit, it hit the fan fast. The ride normally took about 10 minutes. But halfway into it, it started moving at a crawl. We broke out of the trees and found out why. A brutal cold-front and wind storm had dropped onto the mountain. It was colder than I had ever been in my life, as we were exposed 20 feet above a bald hill 10,000 feet up. I don’t know how cold it got, cause my thermometer only went to -25. Even dressed for extremes we started freezing. And the damn lift kept slowly moving along, cause in that wind the cable can untrack with the chairs wildly swinging, so they have to crawl. After about 20 minutes in a torture chamber to make a human being as cold as possible, and damn hard to breathe on top of it all , we finally got to the top. They had ski-patrol waiting for us and immediatly took us to the emergency hut(which the designer had thankfully put about 50 feet from the top of the lift), and shut down the lift, we apparently were the last people to get on before they walkie-talkied down that it was deadly up there.
Anyway, we spent an hour or two in the shack while an EMT trained patrol treated our and 6 other peoples, frostbit faces fingers and toes with cool cloths. (Unthawing frostbite is three times as painful as getting it by the way). Two of the poor suckers in front of us had no face mask at all, and were snomobile evaced down to the hospital. After several cups of coffee and hot cocoa they determined that we wern’t in danger of losing anything, and we all went down to the bottom of storm mountain, where it was still about -10 and calm just like when we had left. We got checked out by a real doc at the base who told us that not enough skin had died to cause a problem other than pain and temporary uglyness.
That always amuses me. I live in the Mojave Desert - plenty of sun, alright, and it’s 100s-120s in July with freezes down to 3 or less (ambient) in January. Those temperatures are in the “uncommon but not rare” spectrum. It’s 35 right now, probably lower 20s tonight.
But hey, there’s plenty of sun! 
(BTW, the highest peak in the Lower 48 is also in CA: Mt. Whitney).
No one has yet shown me any evidence of a month of temperatures below -30F anywhere on the planet to this point, let alone in a place where they have experienced it. Raygun99 made a valiant effort, but even then it was only 22 days, and 18 of them had temperatures warmer than -30F. My post has been there all the time. I wasn’t the one who started saying “I meant windchill” and talking about “at or below zero.”
Look, I know it gets cold in places. I live in Colorado and went to school in Wisconsin. I’ve been to Grand Forks and Edmonton in Winter. It just bothers me when something that gets reported on the news and in the paper every day gets so boggled up in peoples minds. When people say they went skiing in 50 below temps, you’re in Elvis-sighting land.
I’ll give you a break when you cut some slack to us! The fun part of weather stories is the “stretchyness” of them.
I hear ya. I am back in Alberta, but I spent 30 years in southern Ontario. 25- there is brutal. 25- here is not so bad. A few years back I remember Souther Ontario getting hammered with 40- windchill for several days in a row. That was just nasty.
Are you including Antarctica in that statement? Not trying to start an argument, but it would be a surprising fact to me.
Demanding veracity in a thread about the coldest weather someone’s ever been in is like demanding cites in a barroom discussion about the biggest bear someone’s ever shot.
I made a statement that -30 temps for a month straight didn’t happen outside of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. It was just a tossed off comment but now people are trying to nail me on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finds some mining camp in Siberia 60 feet from the Arctic Circle that fits the bill.
I never said it was-30 for a month. I just said it was sub-zero for weeks on end," that -60 windchills were common and that I remembered a single instance of a -60 ambient temp. After looking at Elfkin’s link, I think it may have actually only been in 50’s below but I have a distinct memory of the weather guy saying “it’s going to get to 60 below the donut tonight.” Perhaps it didn’t quite make it that far but the -100 windchill stood out more for me that day anyway. I think you need to go back and parse what I was saying because you keep mixing it up. I assure you, the temps quite often stay at or below zero for weeks at a time in ND in the winter, especially when the clippers come in.
I wasn’t referring to you there. It was to post #2 -
I’ve got no quarrel with any of it; I was just responding to your post for my own clarification.
I guess you know how your medicine tastes now.
I Detroit area we are a subtropical paradise compared to our surrounding communities. When it dropped to -17 ,I dressed my 4 year old kid up and took him out in it. Wife asked why .It was a rare chance to experience real cold weather.We walked around the block.
Snow crinkles differently when it is that cold.The stillness is weird. I would not want it everyday.
The coldest weather I have been in is right now, and yesterday, -30C and then some standing in a rig fabrication yard in Edmonton watching stuff go up and down and round and round.
Given that less than a week ago I was at home either in the pool 0r cooking cow in +35C, it is definitly fricking cold.
The sound of real, true cold to me is creaking snow. The look of it is plumes of steam coming out of everything and going waaaaay up before dissipating. The smell of it is nothing - you get very few smells outside in extreme cold (mostly car exhaust).
I’ve said it elsewhere many times. A dry cold (even -30) is way better than a humid cold like they get here on the mid-Atlantic coast.
Yeah - I can’t even name the coldest it’s ever been here. -40, -50, what’s the bloody difference at this point?
However, you’re not allowed to call yourself a prairie dweller until you’ve walked to Sev in -35 to go get a slush. Damn, that’s good.
I’m just happy it’s not snowing right now, it’s quicker to scrape off the car windows than brush off the whole car.
This whole thread has given me of list of new places not to visit.
I’ll take the heat over cold any day of the year. I start shivering when it starts to get below 65. The only thing I like about cold is snow. But without it winter just sucks.