The Deaths on Mount Washington

Mount Washington is beautiful, and it is a killer. Since record-keeping began, more than one hundred sixty people have died on this mountain and its range, and the toll keeps rising. The exact count varies by source, but the danger does not.

What makes this peak so lethal is that its weather can turn from a warm summer afternoon to a lethal storm in the span of an hour, and people are caught out in shorts and sneakers, far from shelter, when the temperature crashes and the wind rises. The first recorded death came on the nineteenth of October, eighteen forty-nine, when a twenty-nine-year-old Englishman named Frederick Strickland reached the summit in winter-like conditions, lost his way descending, and died in the bed of a mountain stream. Six years later came the death that haunts the mountain most.

On the fourteenth of September, eighteen fifty-five, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Lizzie Bourne set out from the Glen House in the early afternoon with her uncle and cousin, intending a simple walk to the summit. Fog closed in, night fell, the cold deepened, and Lizzie could go no further. She died from exposure that evening, only a short distance from the summit buildings she never saw in the dark.

She was the first woman known to die on Mount Washington. A stone cairn still marks the spot where she fell, a quiet reminder that on this mountain the weather does not forgive a late start.