I did a quick calculation. Assuming $50 as the standard price, it would have cost the
average thru-hiker somewhere between $6,000 and $7,500 to stay in a lodge each night
along the trail. Clearly, it would never have worked. Perhaps it was better that things
were as they were.
The sun was shining weakly when we emerged from the hut and set off back down the
mountain on a side trail to Franconia Notch, and as we descended it gathered strength
until we were back in a nice July day, with the air lazy and mild and the trees fetchingly
speckled with sunlight and birdsong. By the time we reached the car, in late afternoon, I
was almost completely dry, and my passing fright on Lafayette--now basking in hearty
sunshine against a backdrop of vivid blue sky--seemed a remote memory.
As we climbed in, I glanced at my watch. It said two minutes to eleven. I gave it a
shake and watched with interest as the second hand kicked back into motion.
On the afternoon of April 12, 1934, Salvatore Pagliuca, a meteorologist at the summit
weather observatory on Mount Washington, had an experience no one else has had
before or since.
Mount Washington sometimes gets a little gusty, to put it mildly, and this was a
particularly breezy day. In the previous twenty-four hours the wind speed had not fallen
below 107 miles an hour, and often gusted much higher. When it came time for Pagliuca
to take the afternoon readings, the wind was so strong that he tied a rope around his
waist and had two colleagues take hold of the other end. As it was, the men had difficulty
just getting the weather station door open and needed all their strength to keep Pagliuca
from becoming a kind of human kite. How he managed to reach his weather instruments
and take readings is not known, nor are his words when he finally tumbled back in,
though "Jeeeeeeeemf!" would seem an apt possibility.
What is certain is that Pagliuca had just experienced a surface wind speed of 231 miles
an hour. Nothing approaching that velocity has ever been recorded elsewhere.
In The Worst Weather on Earth: A History of the Mt. Washington Observatory, William
Lowell Putnam dryly notes: "There may be worse weather, from time to time, at some
forbidding place on Planet Earth, but it has yet to be reliably recorded." Among the Mount
Washington weather station's many other records are: most weather instruments
destroyed, most wind in twenty-four hours (nearly 3,100 miles of it), and lowest windchill
(a combination of 100-mph winds and a temperature of --47°F, a severity unmatched
even in Antarctica).
Washington owes its curiously extreme weather not so much to height or latitude,
though both are factors, as to its position at the precise point where high altitude weather
systems from Canada and the Great Lakes pile into moist, comparatively warm air from
the Atlantic or southern United States. In consequence, it receives 246 inches of snow a
year and snowpacks of twenty feet. In one memorable storm in 1969, 98 inches of snow
(that's eight feet) fell on the summit in three days. Wind is a particular feature; on
average it blows at hurricane force (over 75 mph) on two winter days in three and on 40
percent of days overall. Because of the length and bitterness of its winters, the average
mean annual temperature at the summit is a meager 27°F. The summer average is 52°F--
a good 25 degrees lower than at its base. It is a brutal mountain, and yet people go up
there--or at least try to--even in winter.