The coldest place I have ever been is Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We were originally scheduled to be there in January but, thank God, we got delayed a month. It was dipping down to almost -20 F at night, and "warming up" to 10 F when we first arrived. In the little over a month we were there, night time lows rose above zero, and daytime highs approached the mid 20's most of the time.
Why anyone lives there is beyond me. I live in the Pacific Northwest. Settlers stopped here when they saw green, verdant valleys and a good climate in which they could farm and make a go of it. The fact that they ran into another ocean was incentive to stop as well.
Ulaanbaatar has none of that. It's nowhere near an ocean that would have stopped them either. So I asked one of the engineers I was working with, a young man who had left to get his education in the U.K., and had returned. I asked him who the dumb SOB was who first stopped there and thought "this is everything I've been looking for...".
He said it didn't quite go like that. It was more a case of Ulaanbaatar was more or less where the Chinese (and others) finally got too damn cold to keep chasing them, and had the good sense to turn around. Then they built that damn wall to make sure they never came back.
So, yeah, we missed the worst - it can hit -30 to -40 F there in January. And this is a big city - 1.3 million of 'em. How a big city continues to function at those temperatures escapes me. I'm glad I didn't have to find out.
Here I am at the Chingus Kahn Memorial on a bluebird 20 degree day:
