December 1981, great lakes naval base, North Chicago IL…marching in formation and waiting outside in chow line…brrrrrrrrrr…
dsw in bfe
My college rugby team holds a winter rugby tournament eash year called Arctic Fest, in 1995 the event lived up to it’s name. The wind chill was -75°. Being a rookie I had to be on the crew that marked the fields before the games, we used concentrated kool-aid to mark the lines in the snow, but we didn’t mark them very well because the kool-aid kept freezing.
We played the tournament, I think 4 teams actually showed up out of the 18 or so that had committed. The referee’s whistle froze to his lips. I duct-taped a stocking cap to my head and scarf to my face so that only my eyes were exposed, at one point one of my eyes froze shut when I blinked, I had to hold my hand against it to thaw it out. 2 players from one of the Milwaukee teams thought they would be manly and play in shorts, they both ended up in the hospital with frostbite.
The craziest part though was that we actually had spectators. I’ll never forget seeing this mound that was a group of about 7 people all huddled together with about 6000 pounds of winter clothing and wool blankets surounding them.
Not on par with some of these harrowing tales, but when I was 15 I had an mini adventure. I had had knee surgery and was wearing a brace on my leg. With some friends we decided to go fishing. My buddy hooked a lawn utility cart up behind his ATV for me to ride in and we went way the hell back several miles away to an abandoned quarry. The quarry was abandonded because they struck a spring and made a small lake.
He backed up the cart so it was hanging off the ledge over the water so I could cast my line. One of the nit-wits wondered what does this rope near the hitch do? It was a dump wagon. He pulled and I was catupulted head first into the water. Because my leg was in the brace I was having a hell of a time treading water and trying to get to a slope of ground where I could climb out. Even in the middle of summer the water was cold as hell, this was early spring time, fucking cold water. I was also wearing a bulky coat and boots.
Once they stopped laughing their asses off they realized I was starting to have a bit of a difficult time. One guy jumped in to help me out and another went in up to his waist to haul me out.
The ride home was excruciating. If we went fast to get there sooner the wind chill made it unbearable. Damn do we make a mess of the carpets when they half carried, propped me up into the bathroom into a tub of warm water.
Never did see the fishing pole or tackle box ever again.
Wyoming resident checking in - coldest I’ve ever been was when I was around 13. 3:00 am my father woke me up to try to rescue some cattle out on the road in front of our house (not our cows BTW) - temperature on the thermometer - 58. With wind chill - around -75. Even bundled up I was freezing. A number of animals froze to death that night all over the county.
I may have been colder one night in the mid 80’s when my dad (its always his fault) had me help him save a neighbors horse who had fallen through the ice into a local canal. Even with flame throwers used for branding raging near-by, coming out of the water was probably the coldest I’ve felt. I guess it was only about -20, but it was horrible.
Growing up in Minnesota, -40F (-40c) isn’t such a big deal. If you dress right and keep moving, it’s not bad. I’ve even had to unzip my down parka while snoeshowing in the backwoods in Northern MN in -40.
The coldest I’ve ever been was spring in Minnesota when I was young. I grew up on a lake, and my buddy and I decided to stand where we knew the water was only chest deep and see if we could break the ice. We jumped up and down for a good ten minutes. Built up a good sweat even. Then boom, we finally went through. We figured it would be easy to get out, but it wasn’t. As soon as the ice was broken in one spot, it kept on breaking the entire way in. My joints all were aching and my muscles were beginning to cramp by the time I kicked myself up onto some ice that would support me when I rolled over. It took a long time to warm up from that. But not as long as it did the next week. When we did it again.
Lake Superior in May is also really damn cold.
I was up north in San Simeon about 13 months ago to see the elephant seals; they only go there a short time out of the year. I was bundled up from head to toe but it still didn’t insulate me against the astonishing wind chill of the bluffs at Piedras Blancas. I don’t chill easily, but I had to get back on the bus half an hour early because I couldn’t take it anymore. It exhausted me as well.
That was colder even than the Januarys I spent in Vegas.
waves to Manitobans from her cozy northern Saskatchewan
Well, through elementary school they regularly kept us outside at -35C for recess. This doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that being cocky 11 year olds we didn’t want to wear gloves or headgear or anything more than a fall fleece and we didn’t move around. We got used to huddling - even if you thought another kid was gross, you needed the warmth. 
I’m lucky enough to usually be able to stay inside when the cold weather hits, but damn, waiting for the bus at -49C (damnit, the school would have closed at -50!) still sucked. Especially with no trees to lessen the wind.
I’ll vouch for the Saskatchewan schools not closing easily. I don’t recall school ever being closed for cold or snow, and I grew up in a small town a little north of Saskatoon - it got plenty cold there. Us town kids didn’t have the luxury of buses, either - we walked, regardless of the weather. When it was cold, we walked faster.
I wouldn’t know about that but I once had my upper lip full of ice. I was working an outside job during some freezing rain and my mustache froze.
You wanna talk about cold? I’ll tell you about cold! It got so cold here today, I had to slather on an extra layer of suntan lotion at the beach - Brrrr. I swear, this Florida weather can be unfit for man or beast, at times.
Uzi,
I know what you mean about freezing in Hong Kong. I’m sure almost everyone laughed when you said you were freezing when it was 14C (57 F.), but I also froze when I lived there. The problem is that its cold in Hong Kong for only a couple of months out of the year so homes, offices, stores and other building are just not built for it. There is no central heating and the space heaters people use don’t help much. And like you said, the concrete buildings are like giant refrigerators. Taiwan is much the same. I remember waiting for a bus and looking at a building with a temperature display on it. The sign said it was 10 C. (50 F.), but man was it cold. People in cold climates go from their heated homes to their heated car to their heated offices and back again. In Hong Kong and Taiwan there is none of that (At least when I lived there.)
Also, the coldest I’ve been in recent memory was the cold snap year before last, when it got as cold in Montreal as I’d been used to in Winnipeg… quite an accomplishment. Walking to Mom’s, I was insufficiently dressed and by the time I got there (a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk), every joint was aching and I could barely speak.
Was based right by the arctic circle for ten months during my stint in the miltary. As a diver. In waters with currents up to 2 m/s. Making the water -2 C. Drysuit or not, that water sucked the life, joy and temperature out of the hardest of us.
but the coldest I have ever been was last year when I thought I’d make a few bucks by taking part in a Hypothermia study being conducted at the University. They told me the water would be 21 C, but when I got there it had mystically been replaced with colder water: 15 C. The shock of hearing that wasn’t as bad as hearing that they’d be monitoring my core-temp with a rectal thermometer. Great. So I went along with it anyways.
The control test was me sitting in the tub for one a half hours, and to eliminate the warm “bubble” of water that one gets if one stays absolutely still in cold water they added tubes to the bottom of the tub that bubbled, hence disrupting the phenomena. I got to watch a movie during the time i was in the tub, but it was hard to enjoy with the constant almost-convulsion like shaking. Remarkably my body temp only dropped 1.5 degrees during the time. The worst was getting out of the tub: not only was I stiff as a board, but the body reacts to the warmth by dilating the blood vessels which rushes the colder blood to the core. Then my temp plummeted down to 35 degrees.
2 days later I got to repeat the experiment, but this time they induced motion sickness to find out if it affects the body’s heating ability. Yes, it does. They had to throw in chunks of ice during the time I was in the tub to keep the water at a constant 15 degrees. Holy-God, it-was-cold. The recovery afterwards was hell on earth. And what did I Get for all this, aside from knowing my physical limits (one of which is the fact that I was conscious at 34 degrees)? The equivalent of 300 US.
Once I fell through ice while hiking in the woods. Pretty cold.
Once, I had a job as a snow shoveler in Ithaca, NY, and one day shovelling, I had really poor gloves and a hat. I got wet, and I got very cold, right through to my core. My fingertips have ached in the mildest cold ever since that day.
The most scared about the cold I’ve ever been was also in Ithaca. A friend and I took a snowy hike around one of the gorges one day. You were NOT allowed to do this and there were barricades set up ,and articles posted there about college kids who had slipped and died while doing what we were doing.
Well, we walked south along the west rim in snow, and decided to go north up the east side. We had to cross a running, frigid, stream and got our feet totally wet. After a while, the path basically ran out but it made as much sense to continue as to go back the way we came, since that was longer and was also deep. We had to trudge through a couple feet of snow. It was so deep and tough, we actually thought that it a better idea to walk along the edge of the stream in places, stepping on icy rocks, and also getting our feet wetter and colder.
Did I mentioned it was about pitch black at this point because this whole thing took WAY longer than we planned?
We eventually made it back (once you got to within about a half mile of the parking lot, the path was packed down) and there was a park ranger waiting for us. We were the only car in the entire lot for the state park.
Very stupid.
I agree. I’ve spent my 39 years of life in the cold areas of Canada (ie not Toronto or Vancouver), and I don’t think I’ve ever been scared about being cold. I think Canadian kids are taught from day one to respect the cold (we don’t always do it, but we know the rules we’re breaking). Last Saturday we went to Jim’s staff Xmas party, and I wore dress shoes and thin dress pants in -19°C weather, and I was quite uncomfortable going anywhere dressed like that. I would have felt a lot more comfortable if I had tossed a pair of jeans and snow boots in the car. That reminds me - I’ve got to toss my winter blanket back in my car.
I don’t ever recall have recess cancelled for cold, either. Granted, this was Kingston, ON, which isn’t as cold as north Saskatchewan, but many were the days when it would drop to -10, -20, plus wind chill. The idea of being kept inside for cold was something I’d never heard of until I was an adult.
As others have mentioned I’ve been in colder climes certainly, Yukon, Nepal, far northern India, hell, I live in the snow belt!
But you may be surprised to learn the very coldest I have ever felt was when I was almost right on the equator.
We were in Bali, it was baking hot, all day, everyday, beautiful beach, we went in a small outrigger out a couple of few hundred metres off shore just past some small islet//rock outcroppings. Right there the reef fell away radically and there was an ocean current that brought thousands of fish and made for perfect snorkelling.
I think we paid for an hour or something, it was awesomely spectacular, getting over taken by a school of colourful fish numbering in the millions is like getting caught in a psychadelic snowstorm.
The reef was huge and wild and everywhere you looked was something captivating.
Now I am not a large being, and a steady diet of fruit and rice and slimmed me down, I was maybe 100 lbs, so that is what I think did me in. We got in the water, I was having some large fun, time was going by, and the water was definitely cooler than at the beach but certainly didn’t seem chilling in any way. About 35 mins in, my body just begins to tremble in a way that’s hard to describe, I wasn’t really aware of being cold initially. I had a bikini and a Detroit Tigers t shirt on to protect my shoulders from the brutal rays of the sun.
So I get to the boat and as soon as I get out of the water into the glaring tropical sun I realise I was cold. I sat there dumbfounded, I couldn’t believe it, it was so hot in the sun. After a few minutes I stopped trembling and felt much more normal and was just itching to get back in the sea, so dove back in. Not 90 secs passed and again I began to tremble just as before.
I spent the final 15 minutes sitting on the tiny craft bobbing on the ocean and soaking up sunshine like a damn iguana. Very frustrated and confused. The ocean couldn’t be but a few degrees cooler here, it was a humbling experience. If I feel warm why can’t I go back in for but a few moments?
As a Canadian I hardly expected such an experience while basking at the equator.
Live and learn, it’s easily the coldest I’ve ever felt. I met up with a med student next day who didn’t think it was nearly as remarkable as I did. No magic to it at all, he assured me. Something about body weight, core temperature, I still wonder about it sometimes. Why did it feel so much colder than say where I live on a day, not unlike today, the high was -10, without the windchill?
New Year’s 2001-2002, four of my friends, my dog, and I went to my friend’s summer cottage in eastern Finland to spend a week there. This is an old wood house with no electricity (well, solar panels, but a fat lot of good they’ll do you in Finland in the winter) and a huge baking oven to generate and store heat. There’s also a smaller cottage a few meters away by the lakeshore which houses the sauna and a small room with two sleeping places.
This was an extremely cold and snowy winter. When we pulled into the driveway (after first leaving the car by the road and shoveling the driveway so we could pull in), the temperature outside was -37 degrees Celsius. (I’ll leave it to the Fahrenheit-savvy to calculate what that is.) There was about one meter’s worth of snow covering the ground.
Well, of course, since it was -37 degrees outside, it was also -37 degrees inside. After looking around for about five minutes, we decided that it was an absolutely useless idea to try and warm up the big house, so we all shacked up in the sauna cottage.
We started heating the sauna and room by first spending 15 minutes chipping ice away from the axe, which had frozen to the seats, so we could go chop a hole in the ice so we could get water to heat up. It took about half an hour, since the ice was nearly 60 centimeters thick. By the time we had made one 50-meter trip from the lake to the sauna and emptied the buckets of water into the water heater, the hole had frozen over again. At one point, my friend’s shoes froze to the porch because she had spilled water while carrying it in and then had stood still for a while taking photographs.
Man, that was an awesome trip. It was actually quite cozy in the sauna cottage, and probably the first time in my life I’ve walked around without a coat, hat and gloves on in -17 degree weather; when you’re coming from outside, it felt like a warm summer breeze inside the cottage! My dog loved it, too; she went on long exploration trips under the snow. It was like watching a cartoon where a mole is burrowing under the ground–there was this white snow-worm that appeared on the surface as Bea tunneled ahead below. 
We also celebrated the new millennium far away, about 30 km east of a small village called Martti in eastern Lapland. -35 there, too, but the cabin was heated. We had a great time tobogganing down the side of the hill onto the ice of the Kemi river.
It was quite short lived, but a friend and I took a ‘swim’ in 37.5f water. And we dried off without towels or anything by sitting on some rocks on a windy, rainy day when it was about 55f out.