Great stories, Barry. I would like to stand well back and watch those poplars explode and shatter. There is not much margin for error at -40. A small injury or vehicle break down could let a man freeze to death before he could get out of the problem. We always kept a breakdown survival kit in the rig, still do.
My older son froze a patch on his cheek within 30 seconds of when we got out of a vehicle.
We were elk hunting the East Kootenays (part of the Canadian Rockies for the geographically challenged southerners here). We had calf elk permits for December. It turned cold, really deep cold. -43 in the nearest town and we were camping in the mountains. Three of us in my friend's old Toyota pickup, including my teen son who became father of Code, who grew up on this forum.
Friend John dropped my son and I to hunt down a mountainside to where John would pick us up below. We walked 40 feet and I turned to my son and saw pale chalky greenish patches (the size of a quarter on his cheek) and tip of his nose. He cupped his mittened hands over his face and it thawed within seconds. After that we tried to keep face shielded and checked each other often. That patch peeled later like sunburn. Getting our partner with the truck to quit and go home was a story itself.
An engineer who worked on the Alaska pipeline years ago told me that the first winter they ran non-stop no matter how cold it got, while testing lubricants and machinery wear. The machines worked in the cold but wore out the metal so fast it was not cost effective. D8 Cats etc. were worn out junk by spring. After that they shut down the job when the temp dropped to a certain point, which I can't recall but think it was around -30 F.
I slept in a crew cab pickup in below -40, stayed warm in a Snow Lion synthetic bag, but by morning hoar frost from my breath was 2 inches thick on every metal surface inside the cab.
