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Peter Frick-Wright (Host): This is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

There are many things that my co producer Robbie Carver does for this podcast. He writes the music. All the boop boop weep bop and the weirr weirr weirr. That's him. He does the final mix on each episode, making sure the volume is at just the right level on every little piece that you're hearing. He edits almost everything that I write, and is somehow able to tell me what he thinks of what I wrote in a way that both preserves our friendship and makes it clear I should take another pass. Stop trying to be clever, and just say what I really mean. He is probably the second most important person in my life, after my wife, Ellie. Nothing you have ever heard on this show would be as smart, or honest, or moving without his guidance and input.

Don't get me wrong, there are things I don't like about him too. No one should have quite such visible abs at 43 years old. And his deal with the devil hairline is infuriating. But there was one time in particular when Robbie went above and beyond for both our friendship and this podcast. The very first episode of the show that we ever made.

It's about the process of freezing to death. An audio journey into hypothermia. It was based on an article in ���ϳԹ��� written by Peter Stark, in which a fictional character drives off the road in a snowstorm, tries to ski his way out, and nearly succumbs to the cold. For the podcast, however, we just did all that stuff to Robbie.

We crashed his car into a snowbank. We miked him up on skis. And then we buried him in snow. For a long time. Because it's really hard to fake shivering sounds. But we got em. This episode is easily the most fun we've ever had making the show. And the show is easily the best job either of us have ever had.

We'll be back soon with some news about what comes next. Until then, enjoy this trip back in time, to when people still left voicemails, instead of just texting.

Tape: You have one unheard message. First unheard message.

Friend: Hey, it's me. Just checking in. Wanted to see if you're coming out to the party tonight. Hot tub is fired up. Uh, dinner's at 8, so, um, hope to see you. Give me a call back if you're gonna come out. Make sure you're careful. It's really cold out there. So, talk to you soon.

Bye.

Narrator (Crystal Ligori): When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and high centers on a snowbank, you don't worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you've just dented your bumper. Your second is that you've failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you'll be late for dinner. You're stuck. As you left town, the thermometer at the gas station read minus 27.

But a little cold never hurt anyone with enough fleece and the sense to keep moving. The cold is a fact of life in your mountain town. The price of admission for your favorite sports. Most of the time, cold means fun. You check your watch. 718. You consult your map. A thin switch backing line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.

It's maybe five or six miles to that penciled square. You run that far every day before breakfast, and you've got cross country skis on the roof rack. This'll be no problem.

Cold slaps your naked face. Squeezes tears from your eyes. Breath rolls from you in short, frosted puffs. Okay. The jeep lies cocked sideways in the snowbank, like an empty turtle shell.

You think of firelight and hot tubs and warm food and wine.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. Using cold water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60. 8 degrees. For a child, it's lower. In 1994, a two year old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house and into a minus 40 degree night.

She was found near her doorstep the next morning, her limbs seemingly frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived. But for all that scientists and statisticians have learned about freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike, and whether it will kill when it does.

The cold does not reveal its motives.

The process begins when you remove your gloves to squeeze a loose pin back into one of your ski bindings. The freezing metal bites your flesh. Your skin temperature drops. Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60 degrees. As the web of surface capillaries on your hands constrict, blood courses away from your skin and deeper into your torso.

Your body is allowing your fingers to chill, in order to keep its vital organs warm.

If you were a Norwegian Inuit hunter, Both of whom frequently work gloveless in the cold. Your chilled hands would open their surface capillaries periodically to allow surges of warm blood to pass into them and maintain their flexibility.

This phenomenon, known as the Hunter's Response, can elevate a 35 degree skin temperature to 50 degrees within 7 or 8 minutes. Other human adaptations to the cold are more mysterious. Tibetan Buddhist monks can raise the temperature of their hands and feet by 15 degrees through meditation. Australian Aborigines, who once slept on the ground, unclosed on near freezing nights, would slip into a light hypothermic state, suppressing shivering until the rising sun rewarmed them.

You have no such defenses. Just an athlete's tendency to sweat.

Only after about 10 minutes of hard climbing, as your body temperature rises, does blood start seeping back into your fingers. Sweat soaks your chest and trickles down your spine. You check your map. You're below a switchback. You decide it would be faster to cut up the hillside instead of following the road.

But after an hour, there's still no sign of the switchback, and you've begun to worry. You pause to check the map. At this moment, your core temperature reaches its high, 100. 8. Climbing in deep snow, you've generated nearly ten times as much body heat as you do when you are resting. And then.

Character: No no no no no no no no no no no no no

Narrator: The loose pin has disappeared from your binding.

You lift your foot, and your ski falls from your boot. Stopping to search, your own body heat starts to work against you. Your capillaries, dilated by exercise, carry heat from your core out to your skin. And your wet clothing dispels it rapidly into the night. The lack of insulating fat over your muscles allows the cold to creep that much closer to your warm blood.

Your temperature begins to plummet. Within 17 minutes it reaches the normal 98. 6. Then it slips below. At 97 degrees, Hunched over in your slow search, the muscles along your neck and shoulders tighten in what's known as pre shivering muscle tone. The temperature control center in your hypothalamus has ordered the web of surface capillaries in your skin to constrict.

Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold.

Character: Oh, come on.

Narrator: Ignoring the pain, you dig carefully through the snow. Another 10 minutes pass. You've been cold before, but this feels different. Without the pin, you know you're in deep trouble. But then, you feel your finger brush past it in the snow.

You even manage to pop it back into its socket and clamp your boot into the binding. But the clammy chill that started around your skin has now wrapped deep into your body's core.

At 95 degrees, you've entered the zone of mild hypothermia. You're now trembling violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response.

You're too cold to think of the beautiful night. You think only of the warm jeep that waits for you somewhere at the bottom of the hill.

You fumble out the map. You consulted it to get here. It should be able to guide you back to the warm car.

It doesn't occur to you in your increasingly clouded and panicky mental state that you could simply follow your tracks down the way you came.

By the time you push off downhill, your muscles have cooled and tightened so dramatically that they no longer contract easily. And once contracted, they won't relax. You're locked into an ungainly, spread armed, weak kneed

Character: snowplow.

Narrator: Moments later, your skis catch on a buried log.

The crash leaves your ankle burning in a way you know is bad. You've also lost your hat and a glove. Scratchy snow is packed down your shirt. Melt water trickles down your neck and spine, joined soon by a thin line of blood from a small cut on your head.

Your heat begins to drain away, and you're becoming too weary to feel any urgency. You decide to have a short rest. An hour passes. You barely notice.

At one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared. But fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You've slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every one degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by three to five percent.

When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. You'll remember little of what happens next.

In the minus 35 degree air, your core temperature falls about 1 degree every 30 to 40 minutes. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.

You've now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering.

Your blood is thickening. Your oxygen consumption has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids towards your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate. It's the only thing you feel at all.

By 87 degrees, you've lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods. At 86 degrees, your heart becomes arrhythmic as chilled nerve tissues hamper its electrical impulses. It now pumps less than two thirds the normal amount of blood. Meanwhile, the lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain begin to trigger auditory hallucinations.

Character: Careful,

Friend: it's cold out there.

Character: Ice, ice, a cold and

Narrator: blistering rain Attempting to stand, you collapse in a tangle of skis and poles.

That's okay. You can crawl. The Jeep. It's so close.

Except hours later, or maybe it's minutes, you realize it's nowhere to be found. You've crawled only a few feet. When your core temperature reaches 85 degrees, you feel the intense need to tear off your clothes. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body's surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.

All you know is that you're burning.

But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize you're lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness.

Friend: Be careful, it's cold out there.

Narrator: You've shed your clothes, your car, your house in town with its furnace, all the layers that keep you warm.

Friend: Hope you can make it.

Peter: We'll be right back.

Narrator: There's an adage about hypothermia. You aren't dead until you're warm and dead. In fact, cold can offer a perverse salvation. Cold slows down bacterial growth and chemical reactions. In the human body, it shuts down metabolism. The lungs take in less oxygen. The heart pumps less blood. At normal temperatures, this would produce brain damage.

But the chilled brain, having slowed its own metabolism, Needs far less oxygen rich blood and can, under the right circumstances, survive intact. Can you hear me? You are lucky. Your friends, worried at your absence, came looking. Your rescuers quickly wrap your naked torso with a spare parka, your hands with mittens, your entire body with a bivy sack.

At the hospital, your stiff, curled form is slid onto a table fitted with a mattress filled with warm water which will be regularly reheated. Your heart is beating at only 24 beats per minute. Your temperature is 79. 2 degrees. These numbers are near unheard of and you are in danger of dying from being saved in rewarming shock.

The constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest movement can send a victim's heart muscle into wild spasms of ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea.

They then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them. Your temperature continues to drop, 78. 9. You're now experiencing after drop, in which residual cold, close to the body's surface, continues to cool the core, even after the victim is removed from the outdoors.

Elevating the core temperature of an average size male one degree requires adding about 60 kilocalories of heat. You would need to consume 40 quarts of chicken broth to push your core temperature up to normal. The doctor slides a large catheter into an incision in your abdominal cavity. Warm fluid begins to flow from a suspended bag, washing through your abdomen and draining out through another catheter.

The solution warms the internal organs. The warm blood in the organs is then pumped by your heart throughout the body, like a car radiator in reverse. Your stiff limbs begin to unclench, as if death is slowly losing its hold on you. For another hour, nurses and EMTs hover around the edges of the table where you lie centered in a warm pool of light.

Fluid lost through sweat and urination has reduced your blood volume. But every 15 or 20 minutes, your temperature rises another degree. 85. 3

Frostbite could still cost you fingers or an earlobe, but you appear to have beaten back the worst of the cold. 90. 4, 92. 2.

From somewhere far away in the immense This cold darkness, you hear a faint, insistent hum. Quickly it mushrooms into a ball of sound like a planet rushing toward you.

You sense heat and light playing against your eyelids. But beneath their warm dance, a deep chill continues to pull. You force open your eyes. Lights glare overhead. Faces hover atop uniformed bodies. You try to think.

Peter: Who are these people? You

Narrator: try to nod.

Your neck muscles feel rusted shut, unused for years. They respond to your command with only a slight twitch. All you can feel is throbbing discomfort everywhere. Glancing down to your frostbitten hands, you notice blisters filled with clear fluid dotting your fingers, once gloveless in the snow. During the long, cold hours, the tissue froze and ice crystals formed in the tiny spaces between your cells, sucking water from them, blocking the blood supply.

You stare at them absently. If the damage is superficial, the blisters will break in a week or so and the tissue will revive. If not, you know that your fingers will eventually turn black, bloodless, and dead, and then they will be amputated.

Hours later, still sluggish and numb, you surface again as if from deep underwater. A warm tide seems to be flooding your midsection. Focusing your eyes with difficulty, you see tubes running into you. Their heat mingling with your abdomen's depthless cold like a churned up river.

Someone speaks. Your eyes move from bright lights to shadowy forms in the dim outer reaches of the room. You recognize the voice. It's one of the friends you set out to visit so long ago now.

Friend: Pretty cold out there.

Narrator: You lurch as if to sob, but you can't make a sound. So you're left with the thought. Heat is tiny, just a lit match in the night. It's the cold that is huge, too big to see from up close.

But you went so far away, you thought you knew the cold. Now you really do. It's breath, it's touch, it's voice. And deep inside, you shudder at the sound.

Peter: That was Robbie Carver as the victim. Our narrator was Crystal Ligori. Voicemail by Tara Murphy. This episode was written and produced by me, Peter Frickwright, with music and sound design by Robbie Carver and Jonathan Hirsch. It was based on an article by Peter Stark. You can find more stories like it in his book, Last Breath, Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance.

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