Cold experiment completed. videos included

[justanothergunnut]

Well today was the day. We recently had a warm front move through with temps jumping up to 30 deg so I had to postpone the fun a few days. Outside temp was 16 deg with low wind. The video did not come out exactly as I planned mostly because I did not plan accordingly. Regardless, the end result was the same. I froze my butt off. For anyone who has never been seriously cold I want to make a couple points about how it effects your body. First and foremost it makes using your hands difficult. Dexterity, strength and sensation of touch are all impacted. Aside from just feeling cold Pain on the surface of the skin Is the first sensation that you will experience. After a while the pain subsides and is replaced by dull throbbing and weakness in the hands. This is followed by a loss of dexterity. Having been VERY cold before I knew that loss of fine motor skills was to be expected but what I really wanted to try to document was what happens after that. The uncontrollable shivers that severely impact motor skills. I simply couldn't hold out that long, I am getting older and the cold is just harder to deal with than it was 20 years ago. I can tell you that if you ever find yourself in a survival situation where you are exposed to extreme cold get to work on shelter and fire BEFORE you start to feel loss of strength in your hands. If you don't you will find it very difficult to carry out the tasks needed for survival. The time from noticeable dexterity loss in your hands and complete loss of fine motor skills is VERY short, you don not have much time.

http://s141.photobucket.com/user/jadc69/media/Coldtestweb1_zps0abe0f9c.mp4.html

http://s141.photobucket.com/user/jadc69/media/Coldtestweb2_zps89c1a6eb.mp4.html

[Rmplstlskn]

I don't miss the heat and humidity of central Florida, but cold also has it suck value for sure... I have invested in QUALITY cold weather gear, but the down side is the BULK of the clothing and the lack of dexterity it restricts...

Thanks for suffering so we could be reminded of the reality...

Rmpl

[hidden_waldo]

Thank you for the video.

The video could be used for a good reason to have a Blast Match in the cold weather kit to make a fire. Just requires gross motor skill to operate. Center it in the palm of hand, press in the security tab, press down, lift arm up and repeat.

[tech]

Something else in addition to the loss of manual dexterity is the slowing of mental acuity. Very well-spoken in the beginning of the videos, but towards the end was chopping sentences, searching for the next word. And probably didn't even realize it at the time.

Cold will sneak up on a person.

Thanks for an excellent post!

[justanothergunnut]

The cold defenitly had a cumulative effect. At around the 30 min mark The wind increased. Not a lot but enough that it was sucking the heat out of me and made it much more difficult. As far as mental process I will admit I was searching for words and a the time excused it away because I was preoccupied with the butting cold. I even made a comment about it on the video. I was only outside for just over 1 hour at 16 deg with light winds not terribly long and yet I noticed my condition deteriorate sharply in the last 15-20 minutes