Hi Dwayne,
Saw this in your first post here: "I want to say the coldest day I shot was more or less -42° though I can't recall whether I'd converted to Celsius by then or not....."
One interesting bit of trivia is that -40 is where Fahrenheit and Celsius coincide.
Mule Deer;
Good afternoon to you John, I hope that the last day of November finds you and Eileen well and since we're on the topic - warm and dry too!
One thing I'm dead certain of is that deep winter cold can come any time it feels like on the prairies after about the second week of October.
Thanks for reminding me of that bit of information, I believe I "used to know" that but as with too many things these days.... It's funny too in that having grown up with Imperial measures, then being around a lot of US folks and then converting to metric I'm doing all sorts of mental math gymnastics trying to make anything from temperature to fuel mileage make sense to me.
Our girls who grew up with the metric system have little patience for me when I say the house is warm at 75° when I've got the wood stove going, but will be okay talking about the temperature outside in Celsius.
We used to have a name for it when the weather outside was below -40° - Damn Cold!
I suspect nowadays some of the younger set who've spent time in the oil patch would have even more descriptive vernacular for it.
As far as hunting in the cold, when we left Saskatchewan there was only a 2 week deer season and it was in November, so if one wanted to hunt deer it was a given it would be in the cold. Similarly to what some of our Alaskan brethren have stated too, the moose season in Saskatchewan was either late November or early December since that was the only way to get into the areas to hunt.
The time I spoke of going in with my late father, it was 35 miles through mostly muskeg via snowmobile. Some years if it didn't snow enough, Dad and his hunting crew just couldn't make it in.
Lastly, someday perhaps I'll attempt to put pen to paper as it were to chronicle some of the adventures of my youth, mostly for posterity as that lifestyle is now gone as far as I can see. There will be including therein a few "Damn Cold" day stories where machinery broke in the strangest of ways, but we figured that was just par for the snow covered course back then.
Thanks again and all the best to you and Eileen as we head into the shortest days and some chillier weather on both sides of the medicine line.
Dwayne
