-30F on top of a mountain in Colorado.
I grew up in Fairbanks Alaska, where it would generally dip down to 60 below once or twice every winter.
The thing is, when it’s that cold the air is absolutely still. Nothing sounds the same. In town you have thick ice fog. And you only have a few hours of daylight. Plastic breaks, but even metal turns brittle. It’s like another planet. You can die very easily on this planet.
My theory about the lack of wind is that wind is air moving. When you’re at 60 below you’re at the coldest place around, and any wind would have to be bringing in warmer air.
It only got below -10° for just that one night and early morning, and the subzero temps of any sort only lasted for 2-3 days, IIRC.
I was in Bristol for 5 years (1993-98), and other than that one episode, I don’t think it ever got more than a couple of degrees below zero the whole time.
About -25F, in January 1985. I was a college sophomore; my girlfriend and I decided to take a quick walk to the store. We bundled up, but it was still so cold that it felt like the tears in my eyes were freezing.
In Siberia, on the road between Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk it was -56C when we stopped to use the outhouse. That’s a negative 68.8 degrees F. I’d been outside at -36 F in upstate New York, and thought I knew about cold, but that day in Siberia was like outer space cold.
The coldest I’ve ever felt outside was after my first and thus far only 50 mile ultramarathon a few years ago. After I finished I sat by the burn barrel chatting with others in the high-50 degree weather in shorts and a t-shirt. When I finally got the strength to get up and walk the couple hundred feet to my car and walked away from he burn barrel I started shivering uncontrollably from the exhaustion. Thankfully there was a portapotty I could shelter in for a couple minutes before making the final leg of my journey.
That felt just as cold as the time I got suddenly hit by a very bad cold, went from feeling a little out of sorts around noon to shivering uncontrollably by early evening. But I wasn’t outside. Both experiences felt a lot colder than -25 did to me!
So, what’s the coldest place on earth where there are permanent residential human settlements, i.e. where people make a living, raise families etc.? (So excluding Antarctica)
Twice that I remember, once as a High School student in Northern Ohio, had to walk 1.5 miles to school in -14F cold, with wind at 20-25MPH. Had on at least 4 layers of clothers and was still cold.
Other instance was flying into Milwakuee at -18F, not as much wind but that rental car took forever to heat up.
It’s 28F at my current location today, so I guess I’m doing better.
A mere -17F, one Illinois night three years ago.
Parts of Greenland would qualify and some of the Finns live in a very cold region. However you want Oymyakon in Russia. Look it up.
It’s because Fairbanks sits in a bowl. You get cold air inversion, which causes the drastic temps and ice fog, and the surrounding hills damp down the air flow. The only cool thing about ice fog is that everybody looks like aliens with ice-encrusted hair, beards, eyebrows, etc.
A Fairbanks anecdote. I went to see my girlfriend in another dorm when it was about -40. I walked out into the arctic entry, stopped in the puddle of water there and put on my mitts and headgear, then walked outside. It was my first encounter with ice fog, so I stood there for about 15 seconds looking around in wonder. When I started to walk, I realized that my wet-bottomed shoes had frozen to the ground.
Never been sub-zero. The coldest I can personally recall is getting into the teens. That was bad enough.
See? You should have worn goggles! 
I have it on reliable authority that the goggles do nothing.
I went winter camping once with a high school friend in the Allegheny National Forest. We learned the next morning that the overnight temps had dipped down to 40 below, and jeez, it felt like it!
I grew up a bit north of Minneapolis, and the coldest I recall was -35F air temp. In Will Steger’s North to the Pole, a book about dog sledding to the north pole, he describes how they acclimate to extreme cold. It’s pretty interesting how they came to think of -30F as “warm.”
Has anybody ever tried cryotherapy? It involves exposing your full body to temps below -200F for a few minutes. It supposedly has anti-inflammatory effects and a variety of other more dubious claims.
-42°C (-44°F) on February 1, 1996 in Winnipeg. The windchill was -57°C (-71°F). Cite
That was a very cold walk from the parking lot to my morning classes at UofM
It was so cold that it didn’t matter if you used Fahrenheit or Celsius.
Darn spell-checker. should have been “the place I was going was the coldest spot in Canada”
-15 F at dusk (as measured by a cheap zipper-pull thermometer). It probably was a fair amount colder than that at night, but we didn’t get out of the tent to check.