Why I love being a writer

[rachelmanija]

I just emailed a friend this question in complete seriousness:

How many miles do you think is vaguely plausible for people to think they can walk in a blizzard if they have supernatural resiliency and can also turn into snow leopards?

Comments

[rachelmanija]

The strength of the blizzard is whatever will allow my characters to walk in it for a while without instantly dropping dead.

[slashmarks]

Yeah. I'm assuming you want it to be a fairly difficult trek, and not just because of the injury? I would probably go in a similar temperature and snow range, but a longer distance, because 'a tiring walk for a not very in shape human' isn't all that inspiring, but much below zero/strong enough wind to take the temperature that far with windchill and you start getting into issues where exposed skin freezes and dies in minutes. (Having realized you live in southern California and might not know this - when the temperature drops that far the weather stations start putting out graphs for the amount of time you can be outside before death per temperature, in case people do it by accident.)

So I'd probably go with maybe 5-10 miles in a temperature around zero with visibility in the range of 10-20 feet? Far enough to feel like an impossible walk for a normal person under those conditions, not so far I'd be raising my eyebrows and going COME ON you are DEAD. This is extremely unscientific but as you note you just want handwave-able, so.

Are you interested in description points? I observe many of the other commentors have not walked in blizzards/been as stupid as me.

[rachelmanija]

Sure! Everywhere I have lived in my entire life has ranged from "warm" to "hot" to "humans beings can live in this heat, seriously?"

(Yes, I'm going for difficult but not impossible. At least, not impossible up to the point where various problems and unexpected difficulties start adding up.)

[slashmarks]

So, the big thing is that when it's that cold and stormy out, being outside is experiencing a battle against the elements. There's a very sharp jump in my opinion from around the twenties, where it's possible to enjoy being outside with the appropriate cold weather gear, to 10 and below, where it is not without exceptional gear, because you're cold even under layers of down and all of your exposed bits - your nose, your fingers - start out freezing and then turn into pure, aching pain, which gradually decreases as they get colder. I understand that when it stops hurting completely is when you have acquired frostbite; I have never gotten that far, but it can be legitimately hard to tell the difference between numb-and-painful and numb-without-pain, so I have on many occasions pulled gloves and socks off terrified of what I was going to find under them.

The most exhausting things about walking long distance are the wind and the ground conditions. The wind will fight you, even if it's not strong enough to actually knock you over. If you're walking into it you have to lean forward and fight like walking through jello or something; if it's blowing into your back you have to learn backward. This throws off your whole stride. It also makes tears come to your eyes, persistantly if you are unlucky like me, which can screw up your visibility.

The ground will be covered in a combination of snow, ice, and snow over ice. You have to walk slowly and steadily and kind of mincing - I can take fairly long strides because I have practice, but your weight has to go directly down and evenly onto each foot, if you try to walk normally your feet slide and you go down on the ground, and depending on what's under you getting up can be its own special battle. So you're slower and the actual strides are shorter than they would normally be. The combination of leaning into the wind and trying to keep your balance over snow means that your balance is very fragile. (Note that I have more experience walking over sidewalk for long distances; you have slightly more traction in the woods because of leaf cover/etc giving way under you, but it's also slippery by nature when wet, so it doesn't always help as much as you would hope. IME you feel more secure and move a little faster but are more likely to suddenly end up on your ass.)

If you don't walk in snow very regularly, also, your muscles won't be accustomed to the specific control you need to stop yourself from falling over, and so you'll start cramping up in your inner thighs and eventually calves, and it will get steadily worse over time; you can stop to rest but that makes you colder and is dangerous to do too much, which makes it worse than other exericse cramps. (This always is an issue for about the first few weeks of snowfall for me and then I get used to it.)

So it's very much an endurance thing. You keep your balance and you keep responding to the wind - this is mostly unconscious after a while - and you try very hard not to notice the fact that whatever bits of skin are not completely covered are aching and your eyes hurt and if it's cold enough the air in your lungs also hurts (it probably shouldn't be this cold if they're out for hours, though I would believe shifter healing can slow down less lethal degrees of frostbite.) If you notice any of those things fully, you might stop moving from exhaustion, and you know that you need to keep moving. Mostly you try to think about other things, and as you get more and more tired your mind kind of goes blank and you move on autopilot and it seems like this is the only place that has ever existed and then you stop thinking, and that's how people fall asleep in blizzards and die.

It's hard to talk much because you generally have to shout to be heard over the wind, and between exhaustion and effort you generally don't want to waste a ton of air doing that (though I have asthma so it's possible this hits other people less hard.) If the snow is thick enough to impede visibility, that really adds to the disorientation because, obviously, you can't see where you are - you're just kind of walking into a void, or maybe into a field of static on a television. This can make it profoundly boring, because you don't really have anything to look at to distract you from the discomfort.

I think that's everything occurring to me right now, unless one of them has an injury that might require crutches? I did a walking commute for a winter on forearm crutches! I can give advice about that too.

[via_ostiense]

You have to walk slowly and steadily and kind of mincing - I can take fairly long strides because I have practice, but your weight has to go directly down and evenly onto each foot, if you try to walk normally your feet slide and you go down on the ground, and depending on what's under you getting up can be its own special battle. . . .

If you don't walk in snow very regularly, also, your muscles won't be accustomed to the specific control you need to stop yourself from falling over, and so you'll start cramping up in your inner thighs and eventually calves

This is the best description I've ever seen on what it's like to walk in snow that's been partly compressed, and it explains why it's so tiring and slow. Walking in a fresh snowdrift that's just piles and piles of snow is one (very tiring) thing, but walking in snow that's been sitting around for a few days and had people tramping around on it, and has turned into a layer of slippery ice with a thin dusting of snow on top is annoying as hell because every step carries with it the possibility of slipping and falling painfully onto hard ice. This whole thread is reminding me why going outside and doing anything in the winter in New York (going to class, the grocery, anything that required walking outside) was such a pain in the ass.

P.S. Plus, the jolt of fright and adrenaline every time your foot slips adds to the overall tiringness.

[slashmarks]

Hah, yeah, you can tell I'm thinking of commutes on packed snow, too. I think everything I've said here is still basically applicable to walking in piles, though - the muscle control is slightly different, but you're still taking short, balanced strides trying not to fall over.

Oh, I forgot about how your legs get wet though! And capillary action takes it further up assuming you're not wearing snow pants, so the numb-pain feeling comes up your legs too.