Coldest-ever in Minnesota? 30 years later, Tower and Embarrass still talk about who holds the crown
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Each winter, the northern Minnesota towns of Tower and Embarrass grab headlines as the coldest spots in Minnesota. But the question of which town holds the title of coldest-ever remains kind of a hot potato.
Thirty years ago Monday, Minnesota was locked in a frozen winter grip. The temperature in Tower plummeted to an incredible minus 60 degrees, breaking a record that stretched back to 1899.
“You had people throwing boiling water in the air, and somebody pounding in nails with a frozen banana. You had all that kind of thing going on,” Pete Boulay, who’s now assistant state climatologist, recalled of the carnival-like atmosphere that day.
Tower police chief Jim Hill appeared on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion show to tell the country of Tower’s claim to fame. “There were people out, the whole town was kind of excited about the whole deal,” he told Keillor. “It was a time to celebrate!"
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People, however, were not celebrating in nearby Embarrass.
Reporters had congregated that day at the home of Roland Fowler, the volunteer weather observer there, in anticipation of Embarrass breaking the record. But Fowler’s thermometer malfunctioned.
“Unfortunately they overloaded his electrical breaker and he lost power,” Boulay said. “So we’ll never know if Embarrass was colder than Tower."
Fowler died in 2024. But when he spoke to MPR News a decade earlier, during another extremely cold winter, he said someone just up the road from him had recorded a temperature of minus 64 degrees.
“If my thermometer wouldn’t have broke, there was no question we would have had it,” Fowler said.
Embarrass even erected a giant wooden thermometer to mark the unofficial record.
Jack La Mar, chair of the township board of supervisors, said they had to take it down recently because it had become a safety hazard. But it’s a source of pride for the community and they plan to bring it back.
“I don’t think you can possibly be a resident of Embarrass and not know about that history,” La Mar said. “I think that is part of the culture, I think it’s part of the character of Embarrass."
‘That’s why it’s always so cold’
Embarrass and Tower frequently record some of the coldest readings in the state in part because of the area’s topography.
The towns sit in a low river valley, hemmed in by higher-elevation hills and ridges. Because cold air is denser than hot air, it sinks. “That air just settles down into those low spots, and that's why it's always so cold,” said La Mar.
La Mar is now the weather observer in Embarrass. He took over for Fowler when he retired more than five years ago. He said the temperature usually hits minus 40 at least once a winter.
But he’s skeptical he'll ever see the record broken. Average winter lows in northern Minnesota have increased by nearly 8 degrees over the past century.
“With climate change, getting that cold is hard to come by these days,” said Boulay. For the record to be broken, he said the perfect conditions would have to align, including a deep snow pack. “You need 3 feet or more of snow. And in the winter of ‘95-96 we had that kind of snow. The deeper the white landscape, the easier it is to reflect any heat into space.”
On Feb. 2, 1996, bitterly cold weather stretched from Minnesota all the way to the Gulf Coast. That’s the kind of weather pattern required to create extreme cold temperatures, Boulay said.
“We’ll have to see if the right weather conditions come together again,” he added.
Until they do, Tower will continue to hold on to its record — to the lasting chagrin of Embarrass residents like La Mar, who said the town’s unofficial reading of minus 64 was later shown to be accurate.
“In my mind,” he said, “that unofficial record is the record.”
