Life at Twenty Below

It's been a year since Montana's last cold weather. I seem to have forgotten. But soon it all comes back to me.

Stepping out this morning into the -20 deg F or colder air, I inhaled a deep breath and felt that familiar, tingling sensation as my nose hairs froze stiff.

In uptown Butte below Walkerville, exhaust heat rises from buildings and moisture condenses into graceful plumes of icy steam (lots of wood smoke haze, too):

Then there was the seemingly deafening sound of an inch of dry, powder snow ("cold smoke," as we skiers say) crunching under my boots. While skiing in these conditions, skis generate static electricity in gliding over the snow and stick because of the "electrostatic friction." Sometimes, in walking at night, I swear I have even seen the snow sparking at my heels--but that's probably just a hallucinogenic effect of the cold.

Cold air contracts (remember "PV = nRT" from your chem class?) and becomes a better conductor of sound. I could hear the routine morning signs of cars, children, dogs, and the local ravens from afar.

On the east side of Butte, the warm waters of the Berkeley Pit (a former open pit copper mine, now a toxic lake) generate the infamous pit fog that creeps down to the flats, rubbing its shoulders along neighborhoods along the way:

The bright morning sun felt warm, but in passing through a shaded area where a cold air drain (depression in the ground) lets cold, dense air flow from the hills above to the valley below, I remembered to rub my stinging cheeks so as to prevent frostbite.

The battery of a digital camera in an outside pocket will not provide enough current for the camera to function. Keep the camera in an inside pocket--which means removing mittens to fumble with buttons and zippers in order to let your fingers to sting with cold once you finally fish the camera out, turn it on, and focus.

A dog -- especially a 13-month Lab/Border Collie cross name of Mollie -- becomes especially energetic. The dense air must help her achieve aerodynamic lift and I swear she could jump over my 6-foot tall frame.

Inside, the heated air becomes super-dry and you can generate some serious sparks of static electricity just petting the dog or cat. And you quickly learn to ground yourself after taking a few steps across the carpet to welcome your wife home with a kiss!

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Butte, America: it's not the Arctic, but you can feel it from here.