The land was death. Not the hot death of predator and prey, but the cold death of things that had never known life. It was the unending death of stone and ice.
"Goddamit" Ethan breathed, moisture frosting into icicles in his wiry beard as he spoke "if it gets any colder I'll need to bring my brass monkey inside"
My novel begins with my MC on a winter hike alone and falling through the ice on a creek and getting totally submerged, then faced with a struggle for survival on a cold winter day. I really worked on this chapter and have revised it several times (and I live in a cold climate and know what bitter cold feels like first-hand). I agree that Into Thin Air and To Build A Fire will give you great descriptions of cold. There are also many true accounts of wilderness survival that are spellbinding. One that you may be familiar with from the movie is The Revenant. The movie is not true to the book and in my opinion the book (non-fiction) is far better. Another about winter survival in Minnesota (true) is Lost in the Wild (Cory Griffith), another true survival story about a 14 y.o. boy surviving a small plane crash in the mountains alone is Crazy For The Storm. The key, I think, is to not write your passages like others have, but rather to use their stories to feel the cold so that you can write the cold. Brrrrr!!! I wrote my own chapter on winter days after walks in the woods. Good luck!
Frigid...maybe? My mother said that South Korean Winters are so cold, that your feet go numb with two pair of wool socks on. Bet she was happy it was only a 1 year assignment. I have heard stories from my father, that in Alaska you can throw a hot cup of coffee into the air, and it will be frozen before it hits the ground. Though my brother seems to like PT in -15 degrees F, in Fairbanks.
Hi guys. I have another related question - while on snowy highlands - I would assume the wind will be strong, therefore the woods would reflect some lashes. But are the woods then colder than the highlands, since they're masked by shadow?
In my experience, no. Shadows or not, trees mask wind. They higher you go, the stronger wind will generally be... the more extreme the wind chill. Wind disrupts the insulating layer of warmth created by a body. I would much rather be in the shade and out of the wind than on a sunny, but frigid and windy hill top.
Yeah, like @Caveriver said, it's the wind that kills you. I live in the mountains and they always train hikers and climbers to have a clear path to the treeline at all times in case an unexpected front comes in. This has happened to me before on Mt. Washington, where 150mph winds are common and unexpected. Hikers have died of exposure in June before. I never seen anything like that, but I've been above the treeline and had to had to make a beeline (hey, it rhymes!) back into the trees when the wind has come up. It sounds like the air is on fire. You can hear it ripping trees boughs down before it hits you. Scary, but cool!
Totally off-topic (opposite of topic, if anything), but I live in the tropics. The real tropics, not pretend Florida tropics. Where I live tin roofs are very common. When a tropical downpour starts, you can hear it from far, far away as it approaches you, hitting the tin roofs. It sounds like a stadium cheering. Frogs start to sing when they hear that, and you know to close up the house.
Ice breaking along the river too. That has woken me up before. It makes a groaning shooting sound first and then explodes.