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Comment by thebent | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the conversion. Whoah, that's cold.

A true northern winter redefines your sense of cold if you are from a more mild climate. The ambient temperatures sting any exposed skin and freeze any moisture (like the inside of your nose or condensation as your exhale) almost instantly. Add in a strong wind and you can feel the heat being sucked from your body even if you have a good winter coat on. Visually, everything changes. Snow piles up so high you can't see over it, humans travel down narrow lanes where the snow has been cleared, everything gets caked in this dirty grey powder of ground up snow, ice, and grit, sun dogs appear in the sky, plants are stripped to skeletons of their summer mass, and you start to see a side of nature that is often invisible (specifically animal trails). I've lived in Minnesota for 10 years and still love the winter and the excitement of a good snowfall!

As an Angeleno, that last sentence does not follow from the rest of that horrific description.

Stockholm syndrome.

He left out SAD and a general sense of having to live a full year's worth of life condensed into the three months where it's tolerable being out of your house.

Even the most winter wary Minnesotan will venture out far more than three months of the year! Spring, summer, and autumn are fantastic here as well. The winter can be long, but if you get outside and enjoy it, you find that you look forward to large snowfalls etc. A mid winter holiday somewhere warm also helps!

I'd take the northern winter over the LA smog and traffic any day (and I say that as someone who loves visiting LA!).

Do not let these other less hardy commenters make you think you are alone in appreciating winter – there's literally dozens of us!

> you can feel the heat being sucked from your body even if you have a good winter coat on.

I've felt that! At -25C 100km/h north wind at a bus stop I think it's my soul being ripped out not my body heat.

I'm guessing he lives within a few miles of the American border. It gets a lot colder than that up here. I remember in college trying to find a kitten on a farm that escaped the house for a girl I was into. No idea what the temperature was, it only had markings to -50c (-58f) and all the mercury was in the reservoir. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to freeze a little kitten in those temperatures.

Yep, Calgary, Alberta. I wager that the folks from northern Montana have the same weather as us.

I grew up in Edmonton and you have to be honest, -35C is an extreme temperature that is only rarely reached. Almost every winter gets to -20C or -25C but -35C can happen but isn't an every winter let alone every day occurrence.

And anyways... it's a dry cold :-) Winters here in southern Ontario are fairly mild but they feel worse to me than where I grew up. A damp -10C is just awful, so hard to get rid of the cold feeling everywhere.

It's usually the deepest part of the winter - I think we'll usually get one week where it's -30 and dips (occasionally) beyond, with the rest of winter being -25C at its coldest.

North Dakota and Minnesota are colder than Montana (at lower elevations too). Take a look at the climate data for Fargo, ND for instance, significantly colder than Calgary. It's colder because it's more continental, and you often see a big bubble of arctic air dipping down on the weather map.

Calgary is a bit of an outlier, they get a weather phenomena called chinooks. It's not uncommon for them to get several periods throughout the winter where their temperatures are above freezing due to these chinooks.

I'm surprised any creature would leave relative warmth for temperatures 50 below (either scale!). Even for a girl.

70/21 is cold?! Damn. That's pretty much the top end of my comfort zone. I'd trade this humid, oppressive southeastern US summer every day of the week for that.

     the winter temperature in my Canadian city
     can reach -35ºC in the deepest part of winter.

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