After a few mild years, this winter of 2025/2026 has reminded the Northwoods who’s boss; mother nature. Across northern Wisconsin we’ve already seen stretches of thirty below temps that make your eyelashes freeze and your car chug to a start in the morning. It’s the kind of cold that flips your perspective fast. After a few days of that, zero degrees starts to feel almost comfortable.
That kind of cold weather memory brings us straight to Couderay, Wisconsin.
Tucked into Sawyer County, Couderay is best known for quiet woods and lakes, but in Wisconsin’s weather history it carries a much bigger title. According to the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, Couderay’s seven miles west station holds the coldest official temperature ever recorded in the Badger state. On both February 2nd, and 4th,1996, the thermometer dropped to negative 55 degrees Fahrenheit. That wasn’t wind chill. That was the actual air temperature.
At the airing of this segment, it will mark the 30th anniversary of the official coldest day in Wisconsin history. Three decades later, that record still stands.
What makes that number even more striking is how close it hit to home. From the studios of WXPR in Rhinelander, Couderay sits about 115 miles to the west northwest, Roughly a two hour drive in Northwood’s terms. Not some distant Arctic outpost. Just another stretch of woods, lakes, and back roads that happened to produce Wisconsin’s coldest day.
By comparison, Rhinelander’s own coldest officially recorded temperature came on January 21, 1922, when the city bottomed out at 46 below zero. That’s extreme cold by any standard, and it still stands as one of the coldest readings ever recorded here. But it’s nine degrees warmer than Couderay’s state record, which helps underscore how rare that 1996 event really was.
And it wasn’t a one-time fluke.
Couderay shows up again and again in the climate records. On March 1st, 1962, temperatures there plunged to forty eight below, setting Wisconsin’s all time low for the month of March. In the Northwoods, winter has a habit of sticking around, old like that doesn’t politely wait for January.
Even more surprising are Couderay’s warm season records. On June 10th, 2006, the temperature dropped to twenty degrees, the coldest June reading ever recorded in Wisconsin. Then, on August 21st, 2004, Couderay did it again, hitting twenty degrees and setting the statewide record low for August. While most of Wisconsin was thinking about mosquitoes, campfires, and late summer nights, Couderay was delivering temperatures that belonged in midwinter.
So why does this happen in Couderay?
The answer lies in classic Northwoods conditions. Deep snow cover, clear night skies, calm winds, and Arctic air masses sliding south out of Canada create the perfect setup for heat to radiate straight back into space. When all of those ingredients line up, temperatures don’t just fall. They drop off a cliff.
Put into a national context, Couderay’s numbers are even more impressive. That 55 below reading puts it in the same cold weather league as northern Minnesota’s most famous cold spots and colder than the record lows for most states. Only a handful of places, mainly in the Dakotas and Montana, have ever dipped lower. Montana holds the record for lowest temp in the lower 48 at -70, which occurred in Rogers Pass, January 29th, 1954. Alaska plays in a category all its own, and set an all-time low temp at -80 in Prospect Creek Camp on January 23rd, 1971.
What makes Couderay special is that it hit these low temps without mountains or tundra, right in the everyday woods and lakes of northern Wisconsin. It’s proof that the Northwoods isn’t just cold by reputation. It’s cold by record.
But wait, it gets better, or worse depending… It should also be mentioned that an unofficial temperature of minus 60 was recorded at the Barron County Sheriff’s Office in Cameron, WI, about an hour southwest of Couderay, on January 9th, 1977, but was not measured with official instruments, making it the coldest “unofficial” reading in Wisconsin history. Brr….
After a winter like this one, when zero degrees starts to feel warm, that history suddenly feels a lot more real.
Bundle up, and stay warm out there!
Source: Wisconsin State Climatology Office and National Weather Service climate records
