We consider a model of heat conduction introduced in [6], which consists of a finite nonlinear chain coupled to two heat reservoirs at different temperatures. We study the low temperature asymptotic behavior of the invariant measure. We show that, in this limit, the invariant measure is characterized by a variational principle. The main technical ingredients are some control theoretic arguments to extend the Freidlin–Wentzell theory of large deviations to a class of degenerate diffusions.