How Cold Are You?

[Frosty]

Bentiron1946 there comes a limit though when taking off more clothes starts to be a *bad* idea if you are smithing... Scale burns can be unpleasant.

Cold is not usually as much an issue here as wind is. A place I see from my front door had 7-8 hours of sustained winds over 100 mph with one gust of 128 last week. I was quite happy to be several thousand feet lower with winds between 20 and 30 mph.

The visual of him taking off enough to be comfortable isn't a treat either Thomas.

The idea you can't put on enough to be comfortable when it's cold isn't so. I've worked 10 hr days outside at -60 and colder driven by 65mph and higher winds. It wasn't comfortable but nobody on a 25 man crew suffered even hypothermia let alone freezing anything. All that winter we saw one guy with a white ear and we got him to the aid shack in plenty of time to keep him from losing even a little of it. The cutoff temp on the slope when I was there was -90f if it was driven by more than a 50mph wind. We got a butt chewin for ignoring that company reg once too many times but who wants to go hang in the Nana bunkhouse all day for no wages?

Keeping out of the wind makes a HUGE difference. Modern cold weather gear is wonderful. Check out the snow suits they use running the Iditerod. Deb has one and it'll make you sweat at -20f. A good friend of Deb was doing chores in the barn one winter some where on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. She slipped on a patch of ice and knocked herself out and it was a good 8 hrs before she woke up. It was -28f and she was on the barn floor for a long time but she awoke warm and comfy in her Iditerod racer designed and tested suit.

I were black liner Regridgiwear or red liner Carharts in the cold. The Carharts being heavy cotton brown duck are not susceptible to sparks, slag and short duration flame contact. Refrigiwear has a nylon shell and should be kept away from fire.

Frosty

[ThomasPowers]

Yup some of the modern stuff is pretty amazing. I dropped out of the mountain climbing program at my college back in the late '70's when they went to the ice climbing section. I could get away wearing layers of wool in the mountain climbing part but you had to spend a lot of dough to keep warm climbing up waterfalls with water still not politely frozen on them.

Sounds like life is a bit uncertain if just going out to the barn can get you in trouble much less having Mutual of Omaha moments wrestling those sons of birches