Country Views - Minnesota's capitol of cold, hot

By Tim King

Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing about this now. After all, winter is finished and summer is just over the horizon. I should, instead, write about Beardsly, in Big Stone County, rather than Tower and Embarrass in St. Louis County. But the subject has been nagging me since a friendly mechanic at my favorite gas station had the courtesy to pump the gas for my car last Feb. 2, Groundhog Day of 2026.

“I was there,” he told me. “It was like a party.”

It’s hard to imagine a festive atmosphere at 60 degrees below zero, but if it’s going to happen it will be in Minnesota on a cold day. But Feb. 2, 1996 wasn’t just any old cold Minnesota day.

“We were snowmobiling at Embarrass the day before,” the gas station historian told me. “A lot of guys thought it was going to happen there. So they were camping out there.”

But his group had a hunch and they took a gamble. They decided to go to Tower. It was, perhaps, an educated gamble when they agreed to try for the ultimate Minnesota cold weather experience. After all, Cohasset had tied with Embarrass for the coldest  day on record way back in 1904 and, just a few weeks earlier, on Jan. 20, 1996, Embarrass and Cohasset’s 57 below had been tied by Tower. Fifty-seven below had been Minnesota’s coldest recorded temperature for over a century. We all had been told Embarrass, with never a mention of Cohasset, was the coldest town in Minnesota. It had been, more or less, since the town’s intrepid weather observers recorded -57 on Jan. 20, 1869, back in the 19th Century. But 1996 was in the 20th, nearly the 21st, Century and it was time for cold weather record breaking.

First came Tower’s tie for first place at -57 F. Then, with conditions just right for extra-frigid weather, cold weather fans jumped on their snowmobiles and headed north to Embarrass, allegedly the coldest town in Minnesota, on Feb. 1, 1996. The next day while most of the nation waited to see if Punxsutawney Phil would see his shadow or not, rugged Minnesotans watched the thermometer in Embarrass.

“We decided to jump on our snowmobiles and go over to Tower,” my free-thinking friend told me. And when the mercury hit -60 F in Tower on Feb. 2, 1996, he describes a party-like scene.

“People were throwing boiling water into the air and it was frozen solid when it hit the ground,” he recalls. 

Meanwhile, in Embarrass, the official thermometer was broken for reasons unknown. It took no measurements on Feb. 2, 1996. It could have been colder than 60 below in Embarrass that day. In fact, there is a claim that a backyard thermometer read in the low -60s but there’s no verification of that reading.

On that day, Tower, with it’s officially recorded 60 below, became Minnesota’s coldest town and no community has come close to breaking that record in three decades. Tower not only has the distinction of holding the single lowest temperature in the State but it tied, with Karlstad, for the coldest day in April, at  -22 F. It also tied with Kelliher for the coldest day in July and it holds the record for the coldest day in August.

No other community in Minnesota holds so many cold weather records. That, I’d say, gives Tower the distinction of being Minnesota’s Capitol of Cold.

Speaking of weather records, I did mention Beardsly at the beginning of this essay. That’s because Beardsley, on the South Dakota border, recorded Minnesota’s hottest temperature on July 29, 1917. On that day the little community recorded a temperature of 115 F. Beardsley holds two other monthly heat records putting it on the opposite end of the thermometer from Tower, making it Minnesota’s Capitol of Hot.