Keep 'dead hands' at bay in the cold
- John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
- January 20, 2025
- 485
As much as I enjoy the winter world, there will always be at least one potential drawback to being out there in the middle of it all — getting cold.
Some of my earliest childhood memories were made in the snow, and nearly all of those are good ones. Building snowmen and backyard forts, engaging in neighborhood-wide snowball wars, sledding down the long, steep and conveniently situated “Hospital Hill” — these are the memories that make Midwestern Baby Boomers wax nostalgic for a time when “every winter was white and wonderful from start to finish.”
There was only one thing other than my mother’s call capable of forcing me in from the wonderland — a phenomenon we as kids called “dead hands.”
Back in late 1960s and '70s, the only thing we kids had to combat cold hands, at least in my family, were chronically ill-fitting, typically mismatched, nearly always nonwaterproof cotton gloves and mittens. As the youngest of the bunch, I remember foraging through a box of mittens, socks, scarves and beanies for anything and everything I could stuff my hands and feet into. Invariably, I’d end up with a mishmash of hand-me-downs that would make even a snowman cringe. It never took too long for my hands to turn white.
Even today, as I roam about through the cold weather on a bicycle, snow skis or on foot, my hands are typically my limiting factor. At least now I have a better understanding of what is actually going on and how to combat it.
In the cold the body’s mission is to maintain its core temperature at all costs. As a result it limits the flow of blood to areas most likely to lose heat to the environment. Fingers have an awful lot of surface area for their volume (think the fins of a radiator), therefore they lose heat rapidly. Raynaud’s syndrome is an overreaction to that heat loss whereby small blood vessels are over-constricted and the hands turn white and stiff.
While somewhat unnerving, if you heed nature’s obvious warning and get your hands temporarily to a warm spot on your body (the armpits are a fine example) to start the reheating process and in from the cold as soon as possible, the symptoms ease and blood flow returns to normal, usually within 15 minutes or so. Some science suggests the more often one allows their hands to become cold, the more rapidly the symptoms of Raynaud’s set in with subsequent exposure.
The best advice, then, is to make sure you keep your hands toasty from the get-go. When it comes to gloves and mittens, it’s still tough to beat the stuff that nature has supplied us with: leather, wool and fur.
And if you need to go a bit further, I’ve had a lot of success with those relatively inexpensive, air-activated hand warmer pouches. The reaction that drives them is no more complex than iron combining with oxygen and giving off heat in the process. There also are a growing number of battery-operated hand warmers and gloves on the market these days. Seek out the ones that are rechargeable to save money and landfill space.
Do whatever you must to keep your paws toasty and don’t let “dead hands” keep you from enjoying a great season outside.
If you have comments on this column or questions about the natural world, write The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email jlorson@alonovus.com. You also can follow along on Instagram @railtrailnaturalist.