The Worst Weather in the World

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

My companions for the weekend seemed normal enough when we first met--a couple of high school teachers, an electrical engineer with his son and grandson, a woman in the wholesale food business and others. But as they eagerly dressed to go outside, I began to wonder. Certainly, even from indoors, the view was magnificent. At a few minutes before sunrise on a brilliant Sunday morning, the snow-covered mountains to the north and west were tinted pink while the valleys below still lay in shadow. But venturing out didn't seem like the wisest move: the temperature hovered around --10DEG F, and the wind was blowing at a steady 40 m.p.h. or so--except when it gusted higher.

That's about normal for this time of year at the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire's White Mountains. It isn't the tallest peak in the country. In fact, at just 6,288 ft., it isn't even the tallest in the eastern U.S. (Mount Mitchell in North Carolina beats it by several hundred feet). But the weather here is some of the worst in the world. Storms blow up without warning. Every so often a hiker caught unawares by plunging temperatures, fierce winds and snow squalls dies of hypothermia.

And that's in summer. The highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth was clocked here, in 1934, at an almost unbelievable 231 m.p.h. (a hurricane qualifies as a Category 5, the most severe, at a mere 156 m.p.h.). When I spent a day at the South Pole a few years ago, you could bundle up and walk around outside with relative comfort. Not here.

But that's precisely the experience members of this group were looking for. To get it, they had plunked down $459 each to ride a snow tractor to the summit and sleep in bunk beds for one of the two dozen or so overnight "Edu-Trips" sponsored each year by the Mount Washington Observatory, a nonprofit organization that's been running a weather station up here since 1932. (Independent hikers can ascend to the summit for free but won't be let indoors at the top unless it's a real emergency.) This weekend's theme was global climate change, with three talks on that most current of topics. On other trips, you might get a tutorial on alpine photography or mountain ecology.

Mount Washington's horrific weather is pretty much an accident of geography. It just so happens that if you plot the tracks of storms as they move across the U.S. from west to east, they all converge, thanks to prevailing winds, on northern New England. The White Mountains, meanwhile, focus things further, turning already bad weather to flat-out hellish. The range stretches from southwest to northeast, pretty much at a right angle to winds sweeping down from Canada. As they run into the solid wall of peaks, the winds stream up and over the top, accelerating all the while.

That direction of flow also compresses the winds between the mountains and whatever air masses lie above, squeezing them like a stream of water rocketing through a narrow nozzle. And just for a little extra oomph, two spurs of the range angle off in just the right configuration to funnel everything right at Mount Washington itself. A calm day up here is almost unheard of.

Still, you wouldn't think my companions knew any of this. In between our tutorials, just about everyone wanted to get outside, as often and for as long as possible. The biggest thrill by far: on Saturday night, the whole group trooped up a metal spiral staircase, then up two ladders and out onto the balcony of the observatory tower, where many of the weather instruments are located. The temperature at that point was --16DEG, and the winds were at about 60 m.p.h., gusting to nearly 90.

As snowflakes sandblasted us at hurricane force, we had to grab the railings to keep from being knocked over. "Isn't it great?" shouted Deb Burch, a science teacher in Andover, Mass., who graded papers between lectures and excursions. Then my hood blew off, and, figuring I had about 30 seconds before frostbite set in, I ducked back inside. None of the hearty folks still outside made a move to follow.