Cogitating on the Cold

I stood still, hands thrust into my pockets, while Duke sprinted across the newfallen snow after his tennis ball.  The wind was blowing hard and I turned up my collar against it.  Duke passed ten yards downwind of his ball and suddenly whipped around, nose to the wind.  From a full sprint to a nintety-degree turn in a single step.  Duke is an agile dog.  His low center of gravity helps.  He’d smelled the ball and now he worked upwind, moving side to side, nose stretched out ahead of him.  In a few seconds he found the ball and brought it to me.  I bent to take it from him and winced in surprise when the sides of my pants brushed against my legs.  The denim that had hung away from my skin while Duke made his retrieve had turned icy-cold, and when I bent down and the cloth touched my legs, it took the warmth right out of my skin.  This was a kind of cold we don’t have in Georgia.  And then it started snowing.

I went inside and, for awhile, watched the snow blow sideways outside my window.  But that was unfulfilling.  Here I was in Montana, in the middle of a whole new kind of winter, and I proposed to spend it sitting in a heated cabin?  That seemed wimpy.  So I bundled up in as many clothes as I could grab – long johns, fleece shirt, wool shirt, jacket, skull cap and balaclava over it, liner gloves and skiing gloves, wool socks and insulated boots – grabbed my muzzleloader, slung my binoculars over my shoulder and went outside to sit on a hilltop and scout for game.  It was late in the afternoon, and dark would come especially early in these overcast conditions, so I knew I probably wouldn’t shoot anything.  But that wasn’t really the point.  I walked across the pasture to the hills, the half-inch of new snow quiet under my boots.  The point was to be outside.

I sat on a hillside just under the top, high enough to see for some distance but not so high that I’d be silhouetted against the sky from below.  It had stopped snowing, which felt anticlimactic but did allow me to see further.  Miles to the west, the white tops of the Crazy Mountains lost themselves in the white sky.  Closer by, Otter Creek had almost completely frozen over.  The creek was a lane of white ice cutting through the pasture, marked on the sides by skeletal willows and cottonwoods.  Otter Creek would be a good way to move quietly and unseen through the pasture, I thought – I could slide over the ice without making a sound, hunched below the height of the banks.  Like a wraith with a rifle.  No, that was melodramatic, I thought – I’d have to come up with another analogy for the blog.  I flexed my fingers, which were getting cold, and lifted my binoculars.  Cosgriff’s horses grazed near the fenceline.

Yellowstone Park gets way colder than this.  Because the Yellowstone caldera sits in a hole, and cold air sinks, the cold air from the surrounding mountainsides pours into the Park and never leaves.  Winter comes early, stays late, and gets downright nasty.  Forty below, they say.  At forty below, things get strange.  For one, the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales converge.  A degree Fahrenheit is smaller than a degree Celsius, so when it is really hot – say, hot enough to boil water – then the number of degrees in Fahrenheit will be really high, but the number of degrees Celsius will be somewhat lower.  Fahrenheit, you see, is the more melodramatic scale.  When water boils, Fahrenheit will label the temperature a whopping 212°, while a Celsius thermometer will report a more modest 100°.  A difference of 112°.  As things cool off, the number of degrees Fahrenheit will drop faster than the number of degrees Celsius, because a degree Fahrenheit represents a smaller increment of temperature change.  When water freezes, for instance, a Fahrenheit thermometer says 32°, and a Celsius thermometer says 0°.  This is a difference of 32°, a smaller difference than before.  And the Fahrenheit scale, with its small increments and relative excitability, will be more dramatic about really cold temperatures as well.  According to Jack London in To Build a Fire, spit will freeze before it hits the ground at -75° Fahrenheit.  In Celsius, that temperature would be a still imposing, but less histrionic, -59°.  Note that at this end of the spectrum, the number of degrees Celsius (-59) is higher than the number of degrees Fahrenheit (-75).  Remember that at the hotter end of the spectrum, the Fahrenheit scale gave higher numbers (for instance, 212° versus 100°) to describe an identical temperature.  So when it’s warm, the Fahrenheit scale gives us higher numbers, and those numbers stay higher than their Celsius counterparts by decreasing amounts until some point below the freezing point of water.  After that point, Celsius gives higher numbers to describe an identical temperature.  At some point, then, the two scales must cross.  There must be some temperature at which the two scales converge – where they report the same number of degrees to describe the same temperature.  There is such a point, and it is -40°.  So -40° F = -40° C.  Strange.

That isn’t the only strange thing that happens at forty below.  They say that at extremely cold temperatures – and -40° qualifies as extreme, especially if you’re a Georgian – water vapor in the air can freeze without ever becoming liquid.  It leaves tiny, unbelievably fragile ice crystals that float on the wind.  “Diamond dust,” it’s called.   Enchantingly, dangerously beautiful.  Apparently it’s one of the few natural wonders that can’t be well photographed because the focus feature on most cameras won’t pick it up.  If you do a Google Images search for “diamond dust,” for instance, the pictures that come up aren’t so great.  So sometime this winter, I want to go see it.  I’d like to experience forty below.  I’ll just have to wear a few extra layers.

I trained my binoculars on Cosgriff’s horses.  The wind blew across my gloves and my fingers were starting to get numb.  The horses had white patches on their haunches – they’d waited out the snowstorm butt-into-the-wind, apparently.  Not the most fragrant approach, but who am I to question evolution?  I wondered if the patches of snow made their haunches cold.  Probably so, especially when they melted.  A horse’s winter coat is warm, I guess, but it’s not a whole lot thicker than the coats that the horses wear in summer, when it can reach eighty degrees Fahrenheit.  That was true, I thought, for most animals – deer’s coats don’t thicken much, nor elk’s, nor rabbits’.  Certainly their coats don’t change as much as mine does.  An elk’s winter coat in Yellowstone could only be thicker than its summertime coat by what – a factor of two or three, at the very most?  And that’s to endure variations in temperature from 70°F to -40°.  Think about the change in human attire that would accompany a temperature swing of 110° F.  We’d go from a tee shirt to five or six layers of fleece and wool.  From bare forearms to Michelin-Man-look-alike.  It would change the percentage of body heat retained by who knows how much.  Certainly a bigger change than a deer, elk, rabbit, or Labrador retriever enjoys.

No, the conclusion is inescapable: we humans are a bunch of wimps.  I flexed my fingers and walked back toward the cabin.  Duke would want to play fetch again, but I was ready to wrap my hands around a cup of hot chocolate.

I posted a picture of this horse, who I have nicknamed Griz, awhile back.  I since found out what happened to his ears.  Apparently, when the horse was a colt, they froze.

That dude looks cold.  Possibly dead.