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

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

Good thing your head was up your azz, so your ears didn't freeze.

I went to all survival schools in the USAF back in 1955 the worse and coldest was at Fairbanks Alaska for 7 days in February we survived with what we carried on our aircraft it was -20 below the whole week c rations and what we could forage for im still cold. oh and waist deep in snow.

Yeah, I remember hearing a story about a soldier that was based out of Greely near Delta...
He was doing the week-long winter survival deal with the rest of his company and he left a bottle of whiskey outside his tent to swig on.
Well, it hit 80 below zero (in what was some of the coldest recorded temps of the modern record-keeping era) and when he drank from the bottle it supposedly killed him. Froze his insides immediately.

The story is supposed to be true, maybe someone here can validate...

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.

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.