Mount Washington and the Home of the World's Worst Weather
Near Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire
Rising over the valley to your west stands Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeastern United States at six thousand two hundred eighty-eight feet. It is the most prominent mountain east of the Mississippi River, crowning the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. The Abenaki called it Agiocochook, most commonly translated as the home of the Great Spirit.
Native peoples regarded the summit as sacred and by tradition did not climb it, believing it was the dwelling place of a power greater than themselves. But the reason Mount Washington is world famous has less to do with its height and more to do with its fury. It is nicknamed the home of the world's worst weather, and it earns the title.
The mountain sits at the collision point of three major storm tracks. Cold air pouring south down the jet stream slams into warm, moist air riding up from the Gulf and the Atlantic, and the surrounding ridges funnel that turbulence straight over the summit. Hurricane-force winds strike here on roughly one hundred ten days a year.
On the twelfth of April, nineteen thirty-four, the observers on the summit recorded the moment that made the mountain legendary. In the afternoon, in blinding ice, their heated anemometer clocked a wind gust of two hundred thirty-one miles per hour out of the southeast. Three men were on the crew that day.
Salvatore Pagliuca, who logged the reading, along with Alexander McKenzie and Wendell Stephenson. For more than sixty years that gust stood as the fastest surface wind ever measured anywhere on Earth. It is worth being honest about the record today.
In nineteen ninety-six an automated, unmanned station on Barrow Island, off the coast of Australia, recorded a gust of two hundred fifty-three miles per hour during a tropical cyclone, and the World Meteorological Organization certified that reading in twenty ten. So Mount Washington no longer holds the outright title. But its two hundred thirty-one mile per hour gust remains the fastest wind ever recorded by human beings physically staffing a weather station.
On this mountain, people were standing in it, writing it down. The summit is a state park now, but do not let the gift shop fool you. This peak kills, and it has done so in every month of the year.
