Click on photo to view TOPICAL Coldest wind chills on record in MontanaNot to in any way diminish the Weather Horrors currently being visited upon so many parts of Our Great Nation. All atmospheric phenomena are of course relative, and very few towns or cities in America are notably prepared for significantly sub-zero weather conditions.
But “facts is facts”, as Will Rogers surely said!
And my hometown of Havre, MT holds the official Montana wind chill record, at 69 degrees below zero in late-1983! I write “official” here, because if anything that number seems a tad CONSERVATIVE to one who resided in the area almost continuously between December 1968 and June 1983.
Havre is an essentially unprotected hamlet of approximately 10,000 inhabitants, located on U.S. Highway 2 along the northern tier of The Great Plains, and situated about forty miles from the confluence of the northern U.S. border with the provincial border between Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. Winds frequently gust above 50 miles per hour and ACTUAL temperatures have regularly dropped below -40 degrees during Winter, with the all-time record low temp for Havre listed at 57 below!
Given that Havre’s record HIGH temp is listed at 111 degrees (though I’ve heard of an “unofficial” record of 117, measured in the area during Summer 1969), I think it possible that Havre’s 168-degree temperature “amplitude” may be greater than that of any other community in the 48 contiguous United States!
As you might well imagine, I have NEVER complained about the mild weather here in Seattle, where I have now resided for nearly 27 years.
As it happens, my family left town about six MONTHS prior to the aforementioned wind chill madness, which occurred on Christmas Eve 1983, the brutal night during which four of the All-Time Top 7 lowest wind chill readings in state history were recorded! (See the attached article for the sobering details.)
So We Four Kipps were spared trying to attend midnight candlelight services at the local First Presbyterian Church under said conditions. (My father Hank—a career U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs forester and natural resources specialist—had been transferred that May from the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation near Havre to the Jicarilla Apache Reservation in Northern New Mexico, near the Colorado state line.)
As I recall, we attended Xmas Day services in the tiny reservation town of Dulce, NM, on a brilliantly sunny morning with temperatures in the low forties, or somewhere in the vicinity of 110 degrees WARMER than back in Havre!
