-64ºC? Bring it on!

As some of you know already, there was a tiny part of me that was actually a tiny bit disappointed that, despite living in the Arctic for almost two years now, I still hadn’t experienced any temperature lower than -30ºC. Well, as the old saying goes, “be careful what you wish for…!”

The air temperature when I got up this morning was “only” -42ºC (that’s -44ºF for those of you still watching in black and white), but with the chill from the 40 km/hr winds added in, the forecast was for it to feel more like -64ºC (-83ºF).

But I still walked to work!

I will take a moment for you all to be deeply in awe of my amazing toughness… before telling you that it honestly wasn’t that bad. As another old saying goes, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing”, and fortunately, my clothing was not inappropriate. Although, there weren’t as many layers of it as you might imagine: t-shirt, long-sleeve top, and hoodie on top, thermal leggings, hiking pants and wind pants below, all topped off with my remarkably lightweight $80 Japanese ‘fashion’ parka – not a Canada Goose in sight! I only even had one pair of socks on!

Now admittedly, the walk to work is less than half an hour – I’m not sure I’d have wanted to be out all day dressed like that – but for the time I was out, I was perfectly warm. Indeed, the biggest problem I had was simply seeing where I was going: with my scarf wrapped snugly across every exposed inch of my face (frostbite is, of course, a very real danger at this temperature), warm, moist air was directed straight up to my glasses with every exhalation. Where, of course, it froze instantly.

Happily though, I could still see well enough, and with the wind whipping so much snow into the air, the sun was the most amazing bright red as it rose: it might have been Arctic-cold this morning, but it was still Arctic-beautiful. 🙂

But hopefully you’ll forgive me for not taking my mittens off to take a photo of it…