Recently there was an article about some writer who took a trip from Colorado to Casper, Wyoming. By the time they got there in their EV, they could have made the trip on horseback. This trip the fellow made was in nice weather, in May, when spring has come to the Rockies and environs.
Now, it gets a mite chilly in Wyoming in the Winter. even if it is six degrees of latitude south of where I normally hang my hat. I admit the second coldest weather I have seen (-54F, Riverton, WY) was surprising to me, not to mention a few locals who marveled at the way rubber (not vinyl, but rubber) hoses could be snapped with a twist of the wrist.
I actually went home that day to North Dakota where it was 20 degrees warmer, laughing to myself about going home to warmer weather, a sentiment later conveyed by an Alaskan going back home from North Dakota. I remember, because not only was it cold, but it was my birthday and I was excited at the prospect of spending it with family instead of at a drilling site on the Riverton Dome.
I made the trip in a carbureted, internal combustion cargo van in one hop, with gas stops in about ten hours, some 550 miles. Even the best horse could only have kept up if the pickup towing the horse trailer was powerful enough.
Keep in mind that it was pretty cold out. I was past Shoshoni before I stopped seeing my breath in the cabin, and dared to pour some now-tepid coffee out of the Stanley Steamer thermos that I had filled before I left Riverton. I think the coffee was actually still pretty warm, but by the time it made contact with the cup, it was down to tepid. No matter, I'd drink it cold.
Vehicles, especially more utilitarian ones, make strange noises when it's that cold out, and the one I was in was no exception, having started to squeak somewhere in the roof above my head, one of bare metal and fiberboard. Such were 70s vintage cargo vans.
With a couple of drops of coffee on my bare fingers, I reached up to push on the roof to see if that would stop the squeak, one layer of sheet metal away from the cold outside--and the coffee froze to the metal. In a lucid millisecond, I pulled my hand away, which saved me from either driving with fingers frozen to the ceiling of the cab or tearing the skin off of them to bring my hand back down.
By the time I got to Bowman, ND, the weather had warmed to a balmy -35F. I got more gas--the second stop because I was running on the top half of the tank, and went home from there, a mere 200 or so miles to the house.
Anywhere along that route I was only a few well-insulated layers of clothes and a running vehicle away from freezing to death.
Now, I haven't mentioned wind, and the ridges and valleys of Wyoming west of the Bighorns, the Powder River country, and the shortgrass prairies of Eastern Montana (AKA: "The Big Empty") and the prairies and badlands of North Dakota are fairly well known for wind. In fact, there have been numerous windmill farms set up to generate electricity in the region (one third of the electricity generated in North Dakota comes from wind farms).
I mention it because it is a constant force, and the joke is that no matter which way you are going, the wind will be blowing in your face (that's known as a headwind, in case the reader didn't get that).
To make the cabin of a vehicle reasonably comfortable, the inside temperature must be raised some 90 degrees above what's blowing by outside, which is why that cargo van heater was struggling to catch up and keep up--and why, incidentally, i was dressed for the weather, as best as it can be done.
Folks around here understand that, even if folks elsewhere don't. But that weather is why I buy tires in the Fall, because no one wants the experience of changing a tire in that weather. It becomes an unpleasant task, working with fingers numbed and aching from the cold even if your gloves are fairly good, and if you failed to bring any along, well, expect those fingers will need to be thawed at some point, quite literally. You just want to avoid that, if possible, it's unpleasant, to say the least.
Winter survival kits, while not mandatory, are a very good idea, and most everyone has blankets or sleeping bags and a heat source or two.
Don't expect to huddle around some campfire, because this is the high plains, and not only is wood in short supply, but calm days are something you see in Westerns filmed much farther South.
My point, though, is that between heating the cabin to reasonable 40-60 degrees Fahrenheit, bucking the wind, dealing with the voltage loss due to temperatures over 80 degrees below freezing, an electric vehicle would only have been a convenient box to find the frozen corpse in, provided the operator had been sensible not to wander away in search of help--a death sentence for most of the folks who do.
In that 550 miles, chances are that the vehicle would have to be charged at least five times, but that doesn't allow for wind, cold, or terrain, so doubling that estimate would likely be the minimum, and possibly more than ten charging stops would have had to be made on the way, through some of the most sparsely populated countryside in the US.
This is a very different world from the urban, coffee-shop-on-every-corner world where a block, even just a building, might have more residents than a whole county here, and where temperatures remain in that balmy region above zero degrees. The unfortunate, unwise, or unprepared here have been known to freeze to death.
Things haven't changed here that much from the days when Jack London wrote 'To Build a Fire' up in the Yukon, and that is recommended reading for anyone who dares to venture out far in Winter in these parts, just to drive home what is at stake.
As for all this 'green' stuff, well, when the leaves have fallen off the well-dispersed trees, and the prairie is a sea of white, shifting under the sundogs in the constant wind, it's nowhere to be seen. Nature prevails, sometimes even in the face of technology. For us to survive that, we may need every tool in the box, but tools have applications, and screwdrivers won't do when you need a wrench.
