No offense taken, my response was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. <img src="/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> (I do get a little tired of being told that Starbucks invented coffee, though. Everybody knows it was Tim Horton's. <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> )

I did an "Ask Jeeves" search for "what is the coldest temperature ever recorded in North America?" and came up with this site:

www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1630.html
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...[temperature] at Snag had dropped to minus 81.4 degrees F, the lowest official temperature ever recorded in North America. ...
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and this one:
www.thecanadapage.org/Canadian_Myths.htm
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The Yukon holds the record for the coldest temperature
ever recorded in Canada -63 degrees Celsius!
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Which would be, let me see - minus 81.4 F.

Interesting note on the first page - the thermometer at the Canadian Weather Office was only graduated to -80 F, so the meteorologists filed a notch in the glass to record where the mercury had dropped to and submitted it to Ottawa, where scientists were able to identify that the notch corresponded to -81.4

Btw, the coldest temperature ever recorded in Alaska was minus 80:
http://sled.alaska.edu/akfaq/aksuper.html#wea
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The coldest Alaska temperature ever recorded was minus 80 at Prospect Creek on January 23, 1971. NOAA records (through 1977) show that to be the lowest temperature recorded in any of the 50 states. The state with the next lowest recorded temperature was minus 70 in Montana. Not surprisingly, Hawaii has the highest recorded low temperature at plus 14. Every other state has a minus temperature as their recorded low.
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However, with the exception of six months spent at an Armed Forces station on Ellesmere Island, where everything was pretty much self-contained, I've never actually been to the Arctic, so you obviously have a lot more experience with this type of weather than I do. <img src="/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

Interesting tid-bit: Hawaii has the lowest high temperature (100F) and the highest low temperature (14F) of all the 50 States. <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Amazing the stuff you can find on the Internet. <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />