“You may want to get our Fairbanks Package,” he suggested. But as I spoke to the mechanic about the heater and told him we were moving to Tok, he offered an additional service. It is pretty typical in Alaska to have an engine block heater (as it is in many cold-weather places). I was getting my brakes checked the other week at the Toyota dealer in Anchorage, and my husband suggested that I also get an engine block heater. Here’s a little video to give you a sense of winters at minus 60. Everyone keeps telling me to try it, but I keep forgetting and going outside when it is cold enough to freeze midair isn’t my idea of fun! I haven’t experienced what happens when you throw a cup of hot water into the air outside. Eventually, a representative from NOAA came by Tok to explain why it wasn’t an accurate reading. My husband took a photo of it and it caused quite a ruckus across the Internet amongst weather geeks. We did see a thermometer at minus 71 degrees. Needless to say breathing in the air at that point is not good for your lungs.ġ0. When you go outside in the colder temps, you can literally hear the moisture in your nostrils crackling and freezing up. Needless to say I let the bottles thaw out and drank it anyway.ĩ. I learned this hard way when I brought all the wine gifts from friends from Anchorage on our drive to Tok. But our place looks like a regular house but with walls a foot thick to keep out the cold and keep in the heat.Ĩ. Not everyone has the same kind of walls, although the log houses do have thick walls for insulation. We have cold days when the temperatures become impossible for the school bus to operate properly and safely.ħ. We don’t have snow days here where kids get out of going to school. Helpful to have a little credit card-sized inside the windshield ice scraper. After a certain point, even your car heater can’t keep up, and your breath turns into a crust on the inside of your windshield. Your breath freezes on the inside of your car windshield. The tires freeze flat and take a while for the air inside them to warm up and smooth out.ĥ. We get “square tires.” When we start our vehicles and start driving in the colder temperatures, the tires clunk and thunk like a flat tire. We get what’s called the “Tok Package” to insulate our vehicle engines – not just an engine block heater which is common in colder states but also an oil pan heater and battery blanket.Ĥ. We put cardboard or leather inside the grill on our vehicles to keep the cold air from freezing the radiator.ģ. ![]() Temperatures can get below -60 degrees Fahrenheit for long stretches of time and most thermometers just don’t go any further.Ģ. Here are some of the things that happened to us, especially the first winter, that still cause friends’ eyes to pop open:ġ. Last summer was mild with many more minus 30s and 40s than past the minus 60 mark. My first winter here was the coldest, with our home thermometer capping off at -60 degrees Fahrenheit. ![]() It’s beautiful here in the summers, cold as all get out in the winters. “You live THERE?! Why in the world? Boy, I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska!!” I explain that my husband’s job brought us here, first to Anchorage and almost two years ago to Tok. When I travel the country and tell people where I live, jaws drop, both out of awe and incredulity.
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