Weather Records Tested Wednesday

A particularly cold snap Tuesday and Wednesday tied one record and set another, according to the National Weather Service office in Cheyenne.

In Rawlins, the all-time low temperature of -36 was tied Wednesday morning. That record dates back to February 6, 1989. Laramie recorded the lowest wind chill, at -61.

In Cheyenne, it only managed to dip to -24 overnight. The all-time record low in the Capitol City is -38, set back in 1875. While that doesn't break the all-time low, it does end Cheyenne's longest-ever streak of days above -21.

According to NWS-Cheyenne Meteorologist Steve Rubin, the last time it reached -21 in Cheyenne was on February 1, 1996. That's a stretch of 5,480 days and the longest of its kind. The previous record stretch without a day that cold lasted only 3,347 days and ended in 1982.

The NWS also suffered website outages Tuesday and Wednesday as it was serving between 15-20 million hits an hour while the same system that brought bone-crushing cold to Cheyenne dumped over a foot of snow across much of the Midwest. NWS says it has bulked up on its servers to avoid problems in the future.