Mount Washington — The World's Wind Record and the Observatory Above
Near North Conway, New Hampshire
On a clear day you can see Mount Washington from North Conway, a broad white dome rising above the Presidential Range to the north and west. At six thousand two hundred eighty-eight feet above sea level, it is the highest peak in the northeastern United States. But height alone does not explain why meteorologists and mountaineers have been drawn to its summit for a century and a half.
Mount Washington is famous primarily for weather. On April twelfth, nineteen thirty-four, observers at the summit weather station recorded a wind gust of two hundred thirty-one miles per hour. For decades that stood as the highest wind speed ever reliably recorded at the surface of the earth.
It has since been surpassed by measurements in other parts of the world, but remains the highest wind speed ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. The weather station on the summit has been in continuous operation since eighteen seventy, and the Mount Washington Observatory, a nonprofit scientific institution, has maintained observations there since nineteen thirty-two. Conditions on the summit can change from calm to dangerous in minutes.
High winds, dense fog, rime ice, and extreme cold are possible in every single month of the year. A cog railway built in eighteen sixty-nine climbs to the summit from the western slope. It is the oldest mountain-climbing cog railway in the world.
A road also reaches the top from the eastern side, running eight miles and opening in late spring.
