Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What is the coldest night you have lived thru?

ETA: i wrote this before i read most of the threads. now i feel like a sissy for even writing this.

not my coldest night, but it was my worst.

motorcycle trip from Houston to Memphis. i was expecting 35* and i was dressed for it. however it was 15*, with 35-55mph wind from the north. add the 60mph of the motorcycle and you have a wind chill around -18*. normally a 10hr trip, but i had 3 flats on the rear wheel. (most likely, poor patch jobs by myself) trip took 21 hrs and ended at 7am, so the bulk of the trip was at night.

ked

-20 the night out elk hunting in Colorado, not counting the wind chill. Only time I ever hunted in a down jacket. Got an elk that day and it froze solid overnight like a block of concrete.

Ha, ha. TFF. Glad to see you back Eh. You do make it mo better.

Eastern slope of the Rockies, 30 miles from the Canadian border.

2 1/2 days - the heater in the house never shut off. temperature was -55 and windchill tacked on another -40.

Several nights when the wife was really pizzed at me. I still shiver with fear that it'll happen again.

i was living in rhode island back in the 80's. went to providence with some characters and ended up getting ditched there. mid january, temps in the teens or lower. i had on my M52 field jacket which ain't much. jeans, no hat, definitely not dressed for the outdoors. all the bars closed and i couldn't get anyone on the phone to come get me. i lived in newport which is a haul. i tried to hang out in the lobby of a hotel with some scumbags and the cops came and tossed us out and told me i had to move along or i'd get thrown in jail. hard to believe but there was nowhere open to get inside and get warm. i walked the streets all night, hanging in doorways and it was friggen bitter cold and whipping wind. finally sometime after daylight i got somebody on the phone to come get me. i know that ain't no alaskan grizzly bear hunt story but that was far and away the coldest damn night of my life. i was completely unprepared and could have easily died from a combo of booze, cold and street scum.

One I remember was when I was like fourteen in the boy scouts. Believing the hype, I was relying on a new "space blanket", basically a plastic tarp shiny on the inside. It was April in New York State. And flat amazing how folks let kids screw up like that back then, today if I were the adult group leader I'd be all over the kids beforehand checking their gear.

Closer to the present... my wife and I and our two heelers were in a Saturn station wagon coming back from New York between Christmas and New Years, that year we detoured through western Pa.

It was after dark when we hit Morgantown West Virginia and we were surprised to see maybe four inches of new snow, as none had been forecast. Then we headed south on the Interstate towards Charleston (??).

We were a little ways south when it began to snow, flurries at first. Then quite suddenly it got heavy, real quick I couldn't see the road surface as it was covered in snow and the reflector posts off to the side were few and far between and partly or totally plastered with snow. No reference points at all. My wife said the snow rushing against the windscreen looked like lumps of styrofoam.

Basically we were in zero-visibility whiteout conditions with no clear idea where the highway was as it wound through the mountains. Stopping was out of the question as we would likely get hit from behind.

In a bit I see the lights of a truck passing us above us on the right hand side.... I had driven clear off of the road surface Carefully I inched back over and got behind the barely visible taillights of the semi. I was really shaken on that occasion, see, I had my wife and dogs in the car with me, and all it would have taken would be a tree or drainage culvert.

Most all the traffic was pulling off at the next exit into a large parking lot, we did the same. Pulled out the wool blankets, shut off the motor and slept in place. Between the blankets and all of us in there I can't say it was cold inside the car. It was like a snow cave, on account of all the windows were soon covered up in snow. Turn on the dome light and all there was was white.

Nine degrees outside at first light, minor league around here but pretty cold by South Texas standards. Turns out we were at Flat Rock West Virginia, or at least the exit for the same. Warmed up pretty quick the next day, enough for travel, in the meantime lots of us just hung out in a nearby McDonald's, waiting for it to clear.

Birdwatcher

45 below zero, 90 below with wind chill. 1992, train in town got loose, crashed into a power relay station, no power to the people at 45 below

winter in 1988. Trying to get home to see my GF, had a little VW and the outside temp was around -6 which isn't too bad compared to some of the other stories, but I had a flat tire and just had a light coat on , jeans, sneakers - I was the only car out on West Kentucky Parkway. I turned the heat on high, and would alternate between changing the tire and getting back into the car, but I was shaking uncontrollably by the time I had the tire changed. I drove to the next exit, found a Jerry's restaurant and just sat in a booth shaking for I can't remember how long. The waitress came over and offered me coffee. I initially told her no but she felt so bad for me she brought me some anyways and then gave me a free breakfast.

I was in bad shape there for awhile. Bout kilt myself over trying to get some pussy.

Since then when winter comes I keep a heavy coat, gloves, hat, boots, candles and blanket in the car

I've spent a night or three in my 4 Runner, traveling across North Dakota and Montana, at about 45 below...

but a little common sense, combined with training in cold weather survival in the Boy Scouts and the Army.... layered several sleeping bags, on a foam mattress out of an old VW camper...and a wool hat on where my head is out of the sleeping bag...

windows cracked to ventilate my breathing, so I didn't catch pneumonia...

start the engine every 2 hours or so and let it idle for 15 minutes, to keep the Mobil ONE thin enough to start in a couple of hours...

wind chill outside was off the charters per usual...

it was cold outside, but I was warm inside...

Flat Rock WVa.. my grandmother's family was from there...

anyone who lives there and has the last name of Lilly, I am probably related to them...

Camping with the scouts in ne Ohio. Heavy snow, I don't know how cold it got. I had a new lightweight tent. All zipped up tight. I awoke during the night, gasping for air. The tent had frosted tight inside. I spent the rest of the night with my head stuck outside, shivering!

Thia is quite a collection of some serious happenings that we have somehow managed to survive. The night I spent wandering around in Gallup sure wasn't as cold as I have ever seen but the bad part was that I had lived in Los Angeles for about eight months and didn't own a cost of any kind and very few long sleeved shirts. Being at least half way prepared is the key to surviving, I think. And then the situation that Steelhead related to us has to depend on mental preparedness. If you don't have that, you are done.

coldest temp I have ever been in was in Chicoutimi Quebec in about 1974 or so.. was in college...was colder than 60 below..
just filled up my gas tank and let the car idle all night, while I stayed in the motel...had to put cardboard in front of the radiator for the temp gauge to even move, while it idled...

next night came back thru New Hampshire, and spent the night in Franconia Notch.. that night up on Mt Washington, they ended up setting some sort of record for low temp...and also wind chill up there on the weather station...

in those days, I use to think it was pretty exciting surviving in rough conditions like that... ahhhhhh the stupidity of youth...

Prepared for outside, not that cold... -12 IIRC. No big deal in a tent.

Not prepared for one night in CO elk season was MOST MISERABLE night of my life.

We thought by the map, we could go in and out to scout and area.... we could not. Had a bit of a tarp and ground cover, thats it.

We were in elk and with bowhunters near, I decided we'd do the nice thing and quietly cold camp. DUMB.

We needed a fire and should have cut lots of limbs for ground cover. That was a LONG night. Probably didn't dip below 15 but the ground sucked heat all night long out of me...and the wife. We managed to do ok.

I'll never ever settle in for a cool night outside without doing it all right. And have since changed what I carry in a pack during the day just in case. Not so much carrying more gear, but better gear more adapted.

And next time, sorry, elk or none bowhunters or none, I'll have a nice fire going.

Mountain Warfare Training (USMC) in Bridgeport, CA. July 4th, 2004, we got about 4" of snow at the 9898' marker. Instructors told us to only pack our warm weather sleeping bag to save room for socks and extra mres, and to lighten the load for the 6 mile or so hump in. Got about 1 hour of sleep. The sleeping bag did its job as advertised for those of us that took our clothes off (the news kept theirs on and shivered all night) and put them at the bottom of our bag next to our feet. After finally dozing off for about an hour I had I serve my time on watch. Couldn't fall back to sleep in the next two hours. Miserable!!

2nd coldest night I remember was early august 2003 on the Iraq/Iran border. Daytime temps had been in the upper 130s and a cool front moved in dropping night time lows into the upper 70s. My teeth chattered that whole vehicle patrol in the early am hours. Funny thing when the body detects that the temp has dropped 50+ degrees that it "senses" cold and begins the shiver response even when the temp is what we would normally consider warm.

First week of Oct., 1980 4 of us were hunting in Wyoming. We got caught in an early blizzard and got trapped on the road in a van. For 30 hours 4 of us were trapped there.

We couldn't even get out to urinate because the wind was coming from four directions. Went in a can and poured it out a small opening in the door. Obviously we could not get out to do anything else either. After a day and a half it was pretty rank in there!

Don't know how cold it got but I don't think I have ever been so miserable.

About 10 years later on a trip to Colorado two of my partners on a bad night put their cots and sleeping bags in the cook tent, one on each side of the wood stove. They were able to feed the fire through the night. In the morning a pot of water on top of the stove was frozen solid.

Isn't every one happy we have so much fun on our trips.

Jim

Probably the night my ex-girlfriend went to work at the same place as my wife.

During the Christmas break of 1968 I was at an invitation-only Winter Camp in the Canadian Rockies, run by the Rocky Mountain YMCA (who I worked for for the next 6 summers). Alberta was in the midst of a record cold snap... the mercury stayed below zero for 35 days in a row, IIRC, and average daily temperatures in the city were in the -30's.

It was colder in the mountains. We never saw the temperature get above -40, and the mercury thermometer was frozen the whole week. The alcohol thermometer read -68 on the 3rd night of the 6-night Winter Camp.

We were sleeping in small lightly insulated cabins with cheap woodstoves for heat. We kept the stoves blazing to the point that the chimneys were glowing red, but our breath was still condensing on the walls of the cabin. I had one of the better sleeping bags, my dad's Woods Arctic 3-star down bag, most of the other guys weren't so well-equipped and many of them doubled up their bags and slept together for the shared warmth. Everybody slept fully clothed. I took my down parka and boots off, that was it.

On the -68 night, our stovepipe started the attic insulation on fire (sawdust insulation, duh!!). Fortunately one of the adult supervisors saw the fire before it got too bad, but all we had to put the fire out was snow... we managed, but in the process our stove was destroyed and we had to sleep the rest of the night with no heat, so it was -68 degrees inside the cabin. We piled all the mattresses in one corner, then rolled into our sleeping bags and lay on each other like a litter of puppies. Nobody slept.

It amazes me, looking back, that the adult supervisors didn't cut the winter camp short... it's a miracle nobody got frostbite or died from the extreme cold. I guess that's a testament to the preparedness of the group, we were all experienced outdoorsmen (even though we were all 15 or 16 years old), had good winter clothing and boots, etc. Also, that was back in the day when we all walked to school every day, even if it was -40... we were just more acclimatized to cold, I believe.

Probably the coldest night I have ever had was at Basic Noncomissioned Officer's Course at San Antonio in February of about '93. It wasn't but about 30 degrees that night but I thought I would sleep in my BDU's inside of my fart sack. Froze my ass off. I had deep- bone chilling cold. One of the ex-infantry guys said to take my clothes off the next night and I wouldn't be as cold. I did and it was much warmer.