What’s the coldest Minnesota has ever been?

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Cold is king in Minnesota. We have ice bars, ice fishing and ice castles. Ice cream shops stay open on the coldest days of the year.

Frozen lakes host pond hockey and art shanties. Some folks wear T-shirts and shorts on below-freezing days like a badge of honor. But how low can the temperature go?

The state’s frigid reputation was on the mind of Miri Hahn, 10. She asked the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, Curious Minnesota: “How cold is the coldest Minnesota has ever gotten?”

The short answer: 60 below zero. But that’s only going as far back as Oct. 1, 1872, when the earliest-recorded temperature was collected at Fort Snelling.

Before then, it’s possible that temperatures dropped even lower than the state’s current record low, said Peter Boulay, a climatologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. But we just don’t have the data.

The coldest day ever recorded in Minnesota was Feb. 2, 1996. Temperatures plunged to a record low of minus 60 in Tower, about 90 miles north of Duluth.

The record-smashing temperature was actually measured at 59½ degrees below zero at 9:10 a.m. near Tower. The National Weather Service then “officially” rounded it down to an even 60 below, the Star Tribune reported at the time.

Even without rounding, the half-degree was enough to break the 59-below record set in 1899.

That frigid day in 1996, reporters and weather nerds descended on Tower to witness the record-breaking weather.

“An Andover man added atmosphere by driving nails with a banana, and an Ely native spit skyward to test novelist Jack London’s promise that it would freeze in midair,” the Star Tribune’s Larry Oakes reported. “It didn’t.”

”It doesn’t crackle,” the spitter, “Iron Mike” Hillman from WELY radio, told Oakes. “Good thing Jack is dead, or I’d have to write him a letter.”

Hillman had spent the night in a tent in the backyard of official Weather Service temperature readers Kathy and Dennis Hoppa, in an attempt to “celebrate winter,” Oakes wrote.

The neighboring communities of Tower and Embarrass are some of the coldest places in Minnesota and have a friendly rivalry about which place is colder.

That day, though, the thermometer in Embarrass malfunctioned and they were not able to get a reading, Oakes reported. Tower took the record and has hung onto it for nearly three decades.

That 60-below day tied Minnesota with North Dakota for the lowest temperature recorded in a non-mountainous state, according to the DNR. (North Dakota hit its record low in Parshall in 1936, according to the National Weather Service.)

Another way to answer Hahn’s question is to look at average state temperatures over a single month.

The coldest month in Minnesota history was January 1912, with an average of -9.5 degrees. In Polk County, which borders Grands Forks, temperatures dropped below zero every night of the month.

And what about the windchill? As Minnesotans know, windchill can make a freezing night feel like the North Pole. (Minnesota can be colder than Greenland at times.)

Jan. 22, 1936, saw the coldest windchill recorded in Minnesota. It was a glacial -67 degrees, according to the DNR.

The coldest Minnesota winter on record in the Twin Cities was 1874-75, when the average temperature was just 4 degrees, according to the DNR’s Climate Journal.

Minnesota’s winters are the third-coldest in the U.S., behind Alaska and North Dakota, according to meteorologist Paul Douglas.

“We are, on paper, in theory, the third coldest state in the U.S.A., if the measure of ‘cold’ is winter temperatures, averaged over an entire state,” Douglas told Curious Minnesota in 2020.

The coldest winter in the past quarter century was that of 2013-14, when the average temperature was 9.7 degrees. Overall, however, the state’s winters have been getting warmer.

Minnesota has warmed by 3 degrees Fahrenheit since preindustrial averages from the late 1800s, according to the DNR — outpacing the global average of 2 degrees.

The winter of 2023-24 was the warmest on record in the Twin Cities, with an average temperature of 29.9 degrees between Dec. 1 and Feb. 29, according to WCCO meteorologists.

Christmas in Minnesota that year was warm enough to get a write-up in the New York Times.

“We don’t see record cold temperatures in the winter like we used to,” said Boulay, the DNR climatologist. “We’re more likely to set warm temperature records than cold ones.”

If you’d like to submit a Curious Minnesota question, fill out the form below:

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