If the freezing past couple of months in the Twin Cities has put you on the verge of a meltdown, remember a brutally cold Minnesota winter is all relative — a matter of degrees, if you will.
And if you're feeling a bit frosty coming off the Twin Cities' coldest January in nearly a decade, try driving five hours straight north to International Falls, the city of 6,000 that trademarked the moniker "Icebox of the Nation." There, in the town that inspired Rocky and Bullwinkle's Frostbite Falls, live America's top experts on surviving brutally cold winters.
One morning last week, when metro dwellers looked at the dawn temperature (9 below, not including windchill) and wondered whether winter would ever end, residents of International Falls pointed to their thermometers and said, "Hold my frozen beer."
The temperature read 42 degrees below zero. No windchill.
"That wasn't even our coldest day," said Paul Nevanen, director of the Koochiching Economic Development Authority in International Falls. "A couple days before, we had these 20-mile-per-hour winds, and it was just brutal."
Look, city folk: Don't feel weak just because your winters pale in comparison. International Falls has been suffering through one of its coldest winters in a decade. On the shores of Rainy Lake, this winter's average daily high temperature in International Falls has been 16.6 degrees; its coldest winter in the past decade was in 2017-18, when the average daily high was 16.5 degrees.
This January was the Twin Cities' coldest for that month in nearly a decade. The month's average temperature at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was 10.7 degrees, 5.5 degrees below normal. That marked the coldest January since 2014, when the Twin Cities saw an average temperature of just 8 degrees.
The National Weather Service's Twin Cities office has issued 15 windchill advisories (for windchills between 25 and 34 degrees below) and four windchill warnings (for windchills below minus 35) so far this meteorological winter, which runs through December, January and February. That's the most since the winter of 2014-15 — and there's still a few weeks to go.