The World-Record Wind

By the morning of April twelfth, nineteen thirty-four, the three weather observers at the Mount Washington Observatory had been living on the summit through one of the worst winters in the station's history. The observatory was a private institution, not federal, sustained by public subscriptions and university partnerships, operating on a peak where the average wind speed in winter exceeds fifty miles per hour and temperatures regularly drop below minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. The observers lived in a building bolted to the granite, chained down against the wind.

At seven thirty that morning, the anemometer recorded a peak gust of two hundred thirty-one miles per hour. The observers noted it in real time, along with a caveat: the instrument's cups were icing over, which meant the actual reading might be low. The verified number was two hundred thirty-one. The temperature was minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. Sustained winds had been averaging one hundred eighty-eight miles per hour for over an hour before the peak was recorded.

That measurement stood as the world surface wind speed record for sixty-two years, until an Australian weather station recorded a higher gust in a tropical cyclone in nineteen ninety-six. For non-tropical, non-tornado conditions, the Mount Washington record still stands.

The summit the tourists reach today by cog railway, by the auto road, or on foot is the same summit where those three men were working that morning. The weather observatory is still there, still staffed year-round, still operated as a private research institution. The conditions that make it one of the most extreme weather environments in the eastern United States have not changed. The mountain does not negotiate.