Here are excerpts from  an article I wrote in the  winter of 1968.  I have lived in Alaska since then, and this was my first and coldest winter in Fairbanks.   The cars, and the weather, have mostly improved since then.  Don Murphy

                                  


                                                                   Humor at Sixty Five Below
 
     


 
     Starting a car at -50 is similar to the situation in which a man is freezing to death and has one match.  He may be able to parlay his small flicker into a fire which will keep him alive, but he has only one chance. The odds are a little better for starting a car but if the motor doesn't catch  on the first two or three tries at -50 or lower, you're dead, because your battery is.  There are gadgets to get around this, which like most gadgets in  extreme situations are of dubious efficiency.  Such as battery plates, and blankets. and the latest expensive high tech gadget, a device which automatically starts a car at adjustible time intervals and runs it for several minutes then turns it off.

  
     When the temperature gets down to -60 he will find that the only thing which will make a car dependable is a heated garage.  If the chechako buys all the 110 volt heaters recommended by locals, he will not only only blow fuses, but will not be able to pay his electric bill.  However, a soldier I met from Ft. Wainwright ran 5000 watts of heaters all night, every night.  He boasted his car  was warm as toast every morning,  at -50.  (The army paid the electric bill.)

      Hilariously funny things happen to ordinary, everyday objects at -50 and colder.  I found that if I dribbled my 10 weight winter oil on the snow I could pick it up in a few minutes like a large worm, and stretch it like taffy. A long dribble of it can be wound into a coil like rope.  Plastic electrician tape becomes as black glass.  A foot long piece of tape was left in the motel parking lot at about -45 and a car ran over it.  The tape exploded into splinters, but didn't puncture the tire.  I sent some of the splinters to a friend in Illinois as a souvenir of the frozen north.

         Before this winter  was over many records were broken for cold in Fairbanks.  The most significant was the coldest 15 days ever recorded by the US Weather Bureau,  -44 degrees below zero average for 15 days.  The thermometer on the motel front porch dropped to -68, and that could only be guessed at because the lowest mark on the thermometer was -66.   It was one of those big filling station thermometers with a red  liquid column about a yard long. But it wasn't a yard long then.  The liquid was hiding down in the bulb.  Of course by that time we didn't care.

      More hilarious things happened to my Scout.  At -60 butyl (artificial) rubber tire tubes get brittle and begin to come apart.  The first symptom is a slow leak at low temperatures, and soon the tubes won't hold air at all.  A butyl tube was responsible for a flat in one of my six ply, nylon tires at -65.   So the tire had to be changed, outdoors. 

            The first mistake I made was kneeling on the hard packed snow while I put the jack under the Scout.  In spite of heavy wool pants and thermal underwear my knees were numb in two minutes. So there I was at -65 in a motel parking lot pounding and pinching my knees.  A couple of old blankets helped, even better would have been kneeling pads.

            A friend of mine and I finally removed the wheel from the car, and something  else hilarious happened.  We found we could use the flat  tire for a monument.   We sat the tire in the middle of the parking lot, vertically.   The flat side of the tire stayed flat and  formed a pedestal. We took the wheel, tire and all, into my apartment and put it into the bathtub, where it  took two hours to regain its original shape.

             The spare was also in a hilarious condition.   The air gauge registered zero.   But the tire was frozen round.  So we put the spare on the Scout, and drove four blocks to a filling station.  The tire kept its frozen round shape with no air pressure.  We put 40 pounds of air into the tire.  It didn't look any different.
       
             This six ply nylon tire had held up the weight of a thousand  pound vehicle for four blocks, without even bulging the sidewalls.  It was frozen so solid that I could flick it with my finger and it would  go "clink" like glass. 
                  
              Many other things happened to my vehicle that winter which weren't so hilarious.  I was driving down a steep hill and felt my foot go slowly to the floorboard.   I managed to stop the Scout and found a puddle of brake fluid on the ground.  A steel brake line near the left front wheel had split, brittle from the cold. 

              The brake lines to the front wheels broke six times and had to be repaired, outside.  I used heat lamps to keep my hands from freezing when I had to take my gloves off to work.  Ordinary light bulbs go dead. The glass cracks from the contrast of the heat inside and cold outside. The heat lamp scorched a hole in my sleeve, but I didn't even feel it.   I learned to bring all my tools and parts out from a warm room just before I started to work, and found a brake line at room  temperature won't screw into a fitting at -50.  The temperature makes them different sizes.
             
              A wrench at room temperature dropped into the -60 snow for just long enough for me to grab it back.  It burned my bare hand like fire and left a white streak across my palm.. The wrench achieved  below zero cold in a few seconds.   I managed to keep my  hands from frostbite, but they became sore several times. 

            On the -65 day the Scout moved!   Its top speed was about 10 mph.  All the power was being taken up by  friction.  But most of the cars and trucks of Fairbanks, which had not been stored in heated garages, didn't move at all that day.

      Then we  had a Chinook.  A Chinook is a hot  wind.  I was wrapped up in my arctic gear, opened the outside door and didn't get the usual steam cloud.  I felt a warm wind on my face.  And the temperature rose!  It rose 30 degrees in 30 minutes, from 40 below to 10 below. 

      This was so hilarious we ran around with our parkas open. 
     
      Until the temperature dropped again.