The White Mountains, Stone, Sky, and the World's Worst Weather

The White Mountains are not especially tall by the standards of the American West. Mount Washington tops out at six thousand two hundred and eighty-eight feet. The Rockies dwarf it.

The Sierra Nevada dwarfs it. But height is not the whole story, and anyone who has stood on the summit of Washington in a gale understands what the mountain's real reputation is about. On the afternoon of April twelfth, nineteen thirty-four, three weather observers named Sal Pagliuca, Alex McKenzie, and Wendell Stephenson were on duty at the summit observatory when their anemometer registered a wind speed of two hundred and thirty-one miles per hour.

The numbers were carefully checked, rechecked, and verified. For sixty-two years, that reading held the world record for the fastest surface wind speed ever measured. It still stands as the fastest wind ever recorded outside a tornado or tropical cyclone.

They called it simply the Big Wind. Mount Washington's slogan, posted on observatory signs and bumper stickers across the region, reads: Home of the World's Worst Weather. The claim is defensible.

The mountain sits at the convergence of three major storm tracks, and its bare summit above tree line is exposed to conditions that elsewhere would require an arctic expedition. Rime ice coats the observatory instruments. Summer temperatures at the top can fall below freezing.

The Presidential Range, the chain of peaks named for Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, and others, catches weather that elsewhere would dissipate harmlessly over flat ground. The Abenaki held the mountains as sacred and avoided the summits out of reverence for the spirits believed to inhabit them. The first recorded European ascent was in sixteen forty-two, by Darby Field of New Hampshire's coast.

He climbed alone into the cloud and came back reporting glittering stones on the summit, possibly mica flakes, catching the light.