The Night Yellowstone Hit Sixty-Six Below, the Old Winterkeeper Slept Warm in a Cabin Under the Snow

Yellowstone National Park, February nineteen thirty-three. On the night of February ninth, the ranger station at Riverside records sixty-six degrees below zero, the coldest temperature ever measured in the park. At Old Faithful, a young man from Chicago lies freezing in the summer staff dormitory under four blankets and his overcoat. A few hundred yards away, an old Swedish winterkeeper sits in a red union suit by the stove of a log cabin buried in snow up to its roof. All winter, the young man called it the groundhog hole. In this video: why a man paid to shovel snow off hotel roofs kept four feet of it on his own, how a Swedish style stone heater holds warmth through the night, why summer buildings fail in deep cold, and what happened when the young man crawled into the cabin at three in the morning. The cold, the Yellowstone winterkeepers and their work are real. The characters and dialogue are a dramatized reconstruction. 0:00 Yellowstone National Park, the Upper Geyser 1:37 His father was a farmer and a woodcutter 4:49 Nineteen thirty-two was the worst year 8:03 He taught him to wax the skis with pine tar 11:04 A big room has far more, and every square 14:15 Gus had built the cabin himself in the summer 17:16 Ingrid had made Swedish rice pudding and lit 20:30 Later they would learn the official number 23:34 "His toes are white," she said quietly to Gus 26:50 Ingrid laughed 30:02 Ingrid had her own last word that night 33:06 Every newcomer who laughed at a snowed