I really like it, yes it made an impression. Always have a plan, and realize any plan can go south, have a plan when the plan goes South. Sometimes no matter your best efforts things do not work out and if you can’t rely on yourself there is no help. A more pure or precise distillation of self reliance, only on ones’self I have not read.
I wonder what they used as fluid in the thermometer? Alcohol and hydrocarbons won’t work, Mercury is a no go. Whatever it was I would be it’s Hazmat spilling. And I wonder what the upper limit of the thing was before it broke. That cold anything other than electricity has no ability to move. And they had tourist it moving in that weather, that’s hard core. Jack London wouldn’t have dared write a story like that, no one would have though people would REALLY do that kind of thing.