Brrr. We're in the dead of winter. And although it's been a mild one in much of the country, the Alaska fishing town of Cordova is stuck under 18 feet of snow -- enough that several buildings have collapsed and emergency shelters have been opened for folks whose houses are stressed. "The region has been pummeled by snow, but Cordova is of particular concern because there is no road access to the town, only boat and plane passage," the Associated Press reports.

In sympathy with the townspeople -- as a reminder that it could be worse -- we offer this collection of snow-centric stories. Peter Stark gives the cold, hard facts about what it's like to freeze to death."There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau's cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived," he writes. "Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions. One of Europe's worst weather disasters occurred during a 1964 competitive walk on a windy, rainy English moor; three of the racers died from hypothermia, though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45."

Ted Kerasote reported on that most terrifying winter disaster. "During two deadly weeks this winter, avalanches swept away 14 lives in the heart of British Columbia's remote backcountry. Were these simply unpredictable, unstoppable acts of nature with a brutal cost?" he writes. "Or did somebody make crucial mistakes? An exclusive report details what really happened—and unfolds the agony of a grieving guide who led his clients to their deaths."

Conrad Anker braved a snowy mountain. Twice. "India's Shark's Fin is a 6,500-foot rock route that's twice as long and just as steep as anything on El Capitan, and once left me defeated," he wrote. "When I took it on for the second time, at 45, a blizzard promptly pinned our team to the wall like insects. Which made me wonder: Why am I here again?"

Brad Wetzler reminds us that a surfeit of snow isn't always a bad thing. "What do you get when you bus two dozen high school seniors from the Nebraska flatlands to the peaks of Colorado for their first winter trip to the Rockies?" he asks. "You get an all-American rite of passage, gangsta rap, and terror on the bunny slope. You get kissy-face, rough surf in the hot tub, flaming stogies, brazen thongs, and a blizzard of memories that will last forever."

And Paul Berczeller recounts a bizarre story of what was cast as cold weather folly. "A body is found in the frozen North Dakota woods. The cops say the dead Japanese woman was looking for the $1m she saw buried in the film Fargo," he writes. "But the story didn't end there."