-40 plus unknown windchill, winter camping in a freak arctic blast in the hills outside of VA Tech. All the beer froze in the cans, the only thing we had to brink was a fifth of Jack Daniels. The next morning, while trying to start the stove (in the tent ) it exploded and burnt the tent to the snow almost instantaneously. It was pretty funny after we got out of our bags, got dressed, and got the f#%& out of there.
-40-something at Huntington's Ravine, NH, ice climbing over a Christmas break back in the day. The ice was so brittle, it shattered with every stick and I never thought I'd get the hell off Pinnacle Gulley that day. Once we got up to the Alpine Garden trail, we took off our crampons for the trudge over to the Lion's Heads slide. The wind was so freakin' fierce that it blew us across all of the frozen ponds on the AG bench. There was nothing we could do, cuz there were rocky spots between the frozen lakes, and we didn't want to wear our crampons across the rocky parts, nor did we want to put them back on to cross the frozen parts. So we "sailed" from shore to shore across the bench. I'm just glad it was a tailwind that day.
I think the wind was like 80 mph or some shit. It gets really windy up on Mt. Washington. Add to that it was so whited-out that we had to stay roped up and "swing a radius" from cairn to cairn to find our way to the start of Lion's Head. The wind was so fierce that you couldn't hear each other when you hollered that you had found the next cairn, so we ended up yanking on the rope real hard to signal the follower to come up. We both ended up with more than a few faceplants from that strategy. It was a freaky day. I was never so glad to be back at the harvard cabin as I was that day. brrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
In my younger years, I delivered newspapers in Idaho Falls, notorius for its deep drifts, cold temps, and stiff winds. Spent many an evening in the dark and -30s trudging along from house to house. I had 120+ customers. It took a long time in the winter...