7 Things You Only Learn About a Minnesota Winter by Living Through One

Your car won’t start, and it’s still dark out.

Many Minnesotans know that morning well.

Unfortunately, it’s only one of the lessons a hard winter teaches.

Here’s what you pick up once the cold settles in for the season.

The Sixty-Below Record

Minnesota’s coldest temperature on record is 60 below, logged three miles south of Tower on February 2, 1996.

International Falls has carried the “Icebox of the Nation” nickname for decades, and it’s probably the town you picture when you think of bitter cold.

The record doesn’t belong to it, though.

Forty-four inches of snow had piled up around the thermometer near Tower, lifting the coldest air close enough to measure.

The town also sits in a shallow bowl that collects cold air rolling off the hills around it.

Six days later, the same spot hit 48 degrees above zero, a swing of 108 degrees in less than a week.

Even the Twin Cities aren’t spared: During a 2011 cold snap, the metro’s wind chill bottomed out at 28 below.

So if you’re ever settling a bet, the nickname belongs to International Falls, but the record belongs to an unnamed spot outside Tower.

The Studded Tire Ban

Minnesota effectively bars you from running metal studded tires if you live there, even though the state gets some of the country’s worst ice.

State law caps the stud size and how much of the tire they can cover, a limit tight enough that the tires on your everyday car can’t carry them.

Only two groups qualify for an exception: Out-of-state drivers passing through, and rural mail carriers working under a permit.

Your fix isn’t metal studs.

It’s a proper set of winter tires that you swap on every fall before the first hard freeze.

And ease off on bridges.

They freeze before the rest of the road does. There’s no ground underneath keeping the pavement warm.

The Snow Emergency Shuffle

Minnesota’s two biggest cities regularly call snow emergencies, and Minneapolis runs the version that can catch you off guard if you’re new.

The city rotates parking rules over three days.

Day one clears every snow emergency route.

Day two and day three flip which side of every other street has to sit empty, odd one day and even the next.

Guess wrong, and the city can ticket your car, tow it, or both.

Read the sign first.

Saint Paul runs its version of the same idea, so knowing Minneapolis’s rules won’t cover you for a night parked across the river.

On the signs, red marks a snow emergency route. Green or brown means an ordinary block.

Reading the Wind Chill

The Twin Cities’ coldest wind chill on record happened on January 22, 1936: 67 below.

The air itself only read 34 below. A 20 mph wind did the rest.

Wind chill decides how fast your skin starts to freeze, so that’s the number you want to check, not the plain air temperature.

They’re rarely the same number.

The National Weather Service’s Minnesota office splits the state in two for its Extreme Cold Warning.

If you live north and west of the Twin Cities’ seven-county metro, it takes 40 below to trigger it.

In the metro itself, and the counties south and east of it, 35 below is enough.

So the warning’s name stays the same on both sides of that line, but the number behind it doesn’t.

The Salt Cutoff

Minnesota’s transportation department stops leaning on plain road salt once pavement drops below 15 degrees.

Below that line, salt does almost nothing.

Not enough to matter.

Crews switch to calcium chloride or magnesium chloride, which keep working in deeper cold, then add sand for traction once even those chemicals quit.

So here’s how to read the road in front of you: If it stays wet and black, it’s still warm enough for salt to work.

If it turns pale and gritty overnight, the salt has quit working, and your tires are doing the job instead.

And if your back end drifts a little on an overpass, that stretch of road has already gone from wet pavement to bare ice.

The Fish House Deadline

Minnesota gives ice fishing houses an eviction date, and it changes depending on where the lake sits.

A boundary line splits the state in two.

It runs along U.S. Highway 10, then Highway 34, then Highway 200 up to U.S. Highway 2.

If your lake sits south of that line, your shelter has to be off the ice by early March.

North of it, you get about two extra weeks.

If you miss the deadline, you risk a conservation officer citing you, confiscating your shack, or destroying it where it sits.

The shack has to go.

Every lake in the state falls under one of those two removal deadlines, whether the ice under your shack looks safe or not.

The Block Heater Ritual

Minnesota's cold can turn a parked engine into a problem by morning, not just an inconvenience to drive through.

If you drive a diesel, it can struggle to start once the block hits 25 below.

A gas engine starts fighting you well before that, somewhere around 10 below.

So you run a cord from an outlet to the engine block overnight, plugging in a small heater that keeps the metal warm enough to turn over by morning.

It's not folklore.