"Mt. Washington’s wintry ferocity draws weather tourists" by Billy Baker | Globe Staff, March 03, 2013
MOUNT WASHINGTON, N.H. — An environment more violent and hostile than any other spot in New England....
The idea that Mount Washington — just three hours from Boston and, at 6,288 feet, a puppy compared with the great mountains of the world — could compete for the title of World’s Worst Weather feels implausible. The term comes from a 1940 article by a Harvard meteorologist titled “The Worst Weather in the World,” though the article was more of an argument that Mount Washington probably didn’t have the worst weather on earth. The observatory adopted the term as its slogan, though Steve Welsh, who has been an observer on the mountain for more than five years, hates the idea of labeling anything as worst. “What about summers in Florida?” he says. But when it comes to consistently fierce weather, Mount Washington is up there. During Superstorm Sandy, they recorded a 140-mile-per-hour gust, and in 1934, observers recorded a wind gust of 231 miles per hour, the highest ever recorded by a human, and until 2010, the highest gust recorded on Earth.
What makes the weather so vastly different from anything else in the northeast is a combination of location and elevation. The summit sits at the exhaust pipe of three major storm tracks, and gets hit specially hard by the winds that come across the country from the west and smash into the north-south wall of the Presidential Range in the White Mountains, according to Brian Fitzgerald, one of the weather observers. The wind accelerates dramatically as it races up the steep slopes to the highest point, where it is squeezed by the lower level of troposphere, something taller mountains avoid by simply being above it.
The weather observers who live at the top of the mountain year-round — they work in groups of four, one week on and one week off — have all been out in legendary stuff. The bad stuff, in particular, requires them to go out the most. A couple oftimes an hour, they may have to climb to the unprotected top of the instrument tower, where a waist-high metal ring is all that keeps them from being blown off, and hammer at the rime ice with a crowbar. That ice is what keeps the observers employed at the summit. Clearing it from the instruments can’t yet be done remotely.
Spending the night in the observatory is a chance for weather nerds to go behind-the-scenes of one of the legendary weather jobs on earth, but also to add to their own adventure resume....
When they’re not outside battling the weather, tourists on the EduTrips are hardly roughing it. For $499, you get a ride up and down in the snowcat, hot meals, and a warm bunk, plus a behind-the-scenes tour of the observatory from an observer who on a recent visit seemed tired of giving the tour.
So this front-page feature is basically a business pitch?
But the cushiness of the trip is enough to make some mountaineers snicker, but smart mountaineers don’t go near the summit of Mount Washington in the most extreme conditions. There are 148 names on the wall inside the visitor’s center of people who did not plan to die on Mount Washington....
Add another one (frown):
Mount Washington avalanche kills climber
Also see: Global Warming Snow Job
I'd say so.
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