New Hampshire
A rock cairn, topped with a chunk of white quartzite, marks the trail up the south side of Mount Washington.
You might think the worst weather on Earth would be found at one of the two poles, or on top of a towering Himalayan peak. But some of the most brutal wind speeds ever recorded were measured on a peak in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range—Mount Washington, the highest point in New England.
From above, Mount Washington is most easily identified by the weather station on the summit. Howling winds and arctic temperatures recorded at this station are a result of geographical quirks, as several storm tracks converge on the mountain. The north-south orientation of the Presidential Range serves as a barrier to winds blowing in from the west, while the coastline of Maine, located less than a hundred miles to the east, tends to generate low-pressure zones that suck storm systems from west to east, creating severe turbulence over the peak. The result: hurricane-force wind gusts, often accompanied by low temperatures, recorded on the summit more than a hundred days each year.
Mount Washington hasn’t always been so frigid. Around 600 million years ago, the rocks that make up the mountain were laid down in tropical seas, near the equator. These sedimentary rocks, mostly sandstone and shale, were later compressed by mountain-building events into quartzite and schist—the rocks found on the summit today. These exceptionally hard rocks don’t erode easily and their stubbornness has helped shape Mount Washington into the fierce heart of the Presidential Range, at 6289 feet.
Mount Washington’s wicked weather has been notorious since 1870, when the first primitive instruments were installed on the summit. In 1932, the world’s first mountain weather observatory, the Mount Washington Observatory, was built here to house more sophisticated instruments for weather and storm research. The building was designed to withstand 300-mile-per-hour winds, and everything that couldn’t be directly anchored to the bedrock was chained to the mountain.
Mount Washington, the highest peak in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, attracts some of the most extreme weather on the planet due to converging weather patterns.
Structures at the Mount Washington Observatory and weather station are chained and bolted to the summit rock of the windy peak. It is open for visitors year-round, although reaching the summit in winter requires a guided snowcat tour or extreme mountaineering skills.
On April 12, 1934, the world record wind speed was recorded on the summit: 231 miles per hour. This still stands as the world record for the Northern and Western Hemispheres, but in 1996 Tropical Cyclone Olivia produced wind gusts up to 253 miles per hour off the coast of Western Australia. Mount Washington also receives around a hundred inches of precipitation a year, with around 300 inches of snow falling in the winter. Temperatures regularly fall well below zero; the wind chill value sometimes reaches a hundred degrees below zero.
The Mount Washington Auto Road is usually open to passenger cars from late May into October, before being closed to the public because of snow. In the winter, the weather station is manned by an extremely hardy team of scientists, who must stay inside the building or risk being blown off the mountain by high winds. Numerous hiking trails, including the Appalachian Trail, run over the summit. Ski mountaineers and ice climbers sometimes scale the mountain in winter via the steep and icy Tuckerman Ravine. Since 1849, more than 150 people have died on trails and slopes around Mount Washington, most from falls and exposure in severe weather.
You might catch a glimpse of Mount Washington on a flight to Montpelier, Vermont, or Portland, Maine. Look for the auto road running to the summit.
