The cold hard facts of freezing to death
By Peter Stark, Outside
When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.
Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head at the register and said he wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight if he were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.
But now you’re stuck. Jamming the gearshift into low, you try to muscle out of the drift. The tires whine on ice-slicked snow as headlights dance on the curtain of frosted firs across the road. Shoving the lever back into park, you shoulder open the door and step from your heated capsule. Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your eyes.
You check your watch: 7:18. You consult your map: A thin, switchbacking line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.
Breath rolls from you in short frosted puffs. The Jeep lies cocked sideways in the snowbank like an empty turtle shell. You think of firelight and saunas and warm food and wine. You look again at the map. It’s maybe five or six miles more to that penciled square. You run that far every day before breakfast. You’ll just put on your skis. No problem.
I was about to compliment the article until I came to this line: “At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Really? We are giving mention to scientific horrors perpatrated by the Nazi death squad on the innocents? Im no prude, but out of respect for the living and the dead, I would ask that you take down this article.
OMG. A reference to a nasty event in history is SO offensive that it requires the article to be removed? Your tender sensibilities are overwhelmed by the harsh realities of what humans are capable of?
Good heavens, we are in such deep kim chee. . .
go back to your soap operas lady.
Harrowing! We don’t get the extreme cold of a continental climate, but hypothermia can and does get people here in the snow or in the water.
Take care, all —
Great article, Kae. Thanks for posting….