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Iowa

Site of Iowa's coldest temp shivers with rest of state

Kyle Munson
The Des Moines Register
The city of Washta in northwest Iowa isn't shy about touting its status as the "coldest spot in Iowa" thanks to a record low -47 degrees on Jan. 12, 1912.
  • Washta recorded Iowa's coldest recorded temperature of minus 47 degrees Fahrenheit
  • The City Hall building prominently displays a thermometer
  • Wind chills plummeted to about minus 50 in parts of Iowa on Monday

WASHTA, Iowa — Doug Eades is the symbolically crucial resident in this town of fewer than 250 tucked into a valley in northwest Iowa.

Since September Eades has been the National Weather Service's official "cooperative observer," taking over for another local who retired from the job earlier in the year.

So this is his first chance to chart the depths of winter in Washta, the town that won its fame more than a century ago as the site of Iowa's coldest recorded temperature of minus 47 degrees Fahrenheit on Jan. 12, 1912.

He dutifully records the daily basic stats of what fuels about 90 percent of café conversations statewide: the weather.

Of course Iowans were even chattier about the climate Monday thanks to wind chills that plummeted to about minus 50 and prompted scores of schools to shut down.

Eades, 51, volunteers his time to measure precipitation, snowfall and — most important considering Washta's historical claim to fame — the high and low temperatures.

The signs at the northern and southern edges of town tout Washta's "coldest spot in Iowa" status.

"It's not one we're proud of, even though we do advertise it a lot," Mayor Don Parrott chuckled while hunkered indoors at his dining room table.

"When you say you're from Washta," he added, "they go, 'Oh, the coldest spot.' " Parrott, 67, a schoolteacher for 47 years, acknowledges that that single day before World War I remains his town's sole marketable nugget of notoriety.

When the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa rolled through here in 2010, for example, riders were encouraged to dip their heads into a giant tub of ice water for an off-season Washta "brain freeze."

The City Hall building, not the town welcome signs, includes a thermometer prominently mounted below Washta's name.

But the official NWS thermometer is mounted high atop a pole in the yard on the south side of Eades' house, connected to a digital readout indoors. The thermometer he calls his "beehive" is a silver louvered cylinder that no doubt ensures a precise reading despite wind, rain and rabid squirrels.

Don Parrott has been Washta, Iowa, mayor for 16 years -- and prefers warmer weather.

Eades' backyard held what he calls the "cannon" — an 8-inch diameter rain gauge.

This may be the epicenter of weather in Washta, but the topic follows Eades wherever he roams in town.

Teller Barb Slota recently sat shivering inside the drafty, 19th-century bank building downtown that was built about 20 years before Washta's record low.

She rattled off her inside wardrobe: snow boots, heavy socks, thick corduroy pants, gloves and cuddle duds.

Yes, it's difficult to count money with gloves.

A sign on the wall of the bank lobby offered $10 "coldest spot in Iowa" T-shirts for sale, but Slota wasn't sure whether any were left in stock. And she wasn't going to go digging for any in the freezing vault.

"Oh, man!" Holly Donaldson said as she walked in and stood at the teller window. "Glad I know how to dress like an Eskimo."

Donaldson is manager of the Car-Go convenience store in Washta where on Monday a line of feral cats sunned themselves against the south side of the building.

When it comes to NWS volunteers such as Eades, they're sprinkled around the state in as dense and systematic a pattern as possible. They fill in the gaps between readings from airports and other official weather stations.

Eades, who has lived for 18 years in Washta, volunteers in part because he feels he has the time to donate. (He's on disability for nerve damage in his feet that leaves him feeling as if he's "walking on marbles.")

But he also just loves the weather. Nothing thrills him so much as a summer thunderstorm, he said, or a winter blizzard that rolls in across the prairie.

The NWS office in Johnston handles 51 Iowa counties and about 100 observers out of its office. But the office in Sioux Falls, S.D., oversees Washta among its 11 Iowa counties in the northwest corner, a region relatively thickly populated with 56 observers.

While all observers measure precipitation, only about two-thirds of them, like Eades, track high and low temps.

So this is the crux of Washta's fame and such weather record-keeping in general: There very well might have been a lower temperature in Iowa in the last century. There just wasn't a cooperative observer there to record it. Yet again, certitude eludes us in life.

Also, the town of Elkader on Feb. 3, 1996, tied Washta's record of minus 47. But of course Elkader isn't mentioned on the Washta signs.

"No, we don't," Elkader City Administrator Jennifer Cowsert said when asked whether her town had plastered any of its own minus 47 signs on the streets. "But maybe we should."

But don't look for Washta to launch some sort of Jan. 12 parade or "Coldest Spot Fest." It's hard to drum up that level of enthusiasm in the depths of winter here in rural Iowa where an aging population also means more shivering per capita.

Even Parrott, Washta's own mayor, said, "I prefer the warmer weather, but, you know, you can't do anything about it."

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