| I went snowboarding in Vermont this past weekend, and it was kind of cold. The high for Saturday was 13°F; the low was something like -5. But when we were driving to the mountain in the morning, my car said -7, which was the first time I've seen a negative number on my car's thermometer. The weather report also mentioned that the wind chill on the mountain made the temperature feel like -20 or -30, at which point it doesn't even seem worthwhile mentioning a number. It's just really cold. That's about it. I was considering calling off the trip because I had never been in temperatures like that, but we went through with it, and it really wasn't that bad. Like the cold weather people would suggest, we dressed in layers. I had on three layers of pants and four layers of shirts. And aside from my feet being cold early on, I was warm the whole day. One thing that helped was to do dangerous things (like going fast and hitting jumps) to increase my adrenaline levels and heart rate. One thing I did notice, however, was that if any skin was exposed to the air, it got cold quicker than normal. I had to take my gloves off a few times, and each time my hands only lasted about 15 seconds before they started getting cold. Another interesting thing about extreme cold is that frost forms in unusual settings. We saw a woman running on the road on our way to the mountain, and her pants were covered with frost, making her look like she rolled around in the snow. Weird stuff. All in all, cold isn't that bad, as long as you're not too far from a warm place. #nature |