Blast from the Past: Experiencing Mount Washington’s Legendary Winds

Mount Washington stands only 6,288 feet high, yet it’s said to have claimed the lives of more people per vertical foot than any other peak in the world. Set in the heart of the White Mountains region of New Hampshire, Mount Washington sees often-violent shifts in temperature, precipitation, and wind, making it exceedingly perilous. Dawn might find the peak calmly welcoming the sun’s warmth; by noon, fierce wind might rush up its slope every minute, carrying ice-laden clouds so thick that visibility nears zero.

Mount Washington’s notoriously changeable climate, however, makes the summit an ideal location for studying the wonders of our restless atmosphere. And in 1934, three men stationed there were doing just that when they experienced some of the most extreme conditions ever recorded.

The country was still in the depths of the Great Depression when Salvatore “Sal” Pagliuca, Wendell “Steve” Stephenson, and Alexander “Mac” McKenzie accepted the $5-a-week job of monitoring the wind, rain, and snow atop Mount Washington while sharing a small timber-framed cabin literally chained to the rocky peak. Pagliuca, a former electrical engineer with GE who had emigrated from Italy, led the effort. He spent his time carefully calibrating and recalibrating their anemometer, which was custom-designed to withstand the elements. Even so, the instrument, set on the roof of the cabin, needed constant care.

The biggest obstacle was rime ice, a phenomenon that transforms the barren summit of Mount Washington into a fantastic frosted confection. Rime occurs when supercooled water molecules carried by the wind hit something solid, such as the cup of an anemometer, or an antenna, or a scientist’s beard. The water molecules crystallize, accreting into dainty spears that point accusingly in the direction of the wind. Weighted with rime and pummeled by hurricane-force gusts over long periods of time, meteorological instruments break, freeze up, fly away. Even today, the observer’s job includes breaking the ice with a sledgehammer if necessary, and sometimes hourly under the most challenging circumstances.

In 1934, just as today, there was always something to fix or tweak on the mountaintop. Fresh from earning his engineering degree, Stephenson was a born tinkerer who earned his keep fixing anything and everything. McKenzie, meanwhile, was a recent Dartmouth grad who developed some expertise working the complex radio equipment of the time, as maintaining communication with others in the region was a key feature of the weather-reporting operation.

These being hard times, the trio would have been satisfied to have a bed, a roof, food in their bellies, and meaningful work. But they were also experienced mountaineers, drawn to the edge of life where beauty and death intensify each other. They were eager to test themselves in the unforgiving climate of Mount Washington.

* * * * *

Almost 90 years later, I decided to immerse myself in that same environment. I headed to Mount Washington from Boston on April 11, 2023. I chose the date because it was on the next day in 1934 that the three weather observers atop the summit recorded the highest wind speed on earth, an astonishing 231 miles per hour. It was a record that would not be broken for another 62 years, and still remains the fastest wind ever observed at a staffed weather station.

In hopes of experiencing something like that myself, a ferocity of wind I had never known, I would be spending the night at the Mount Washington Observatory (MWOBS). Unlike the 1934 trio, I’d be living in relative luxury in a bunker-like reinforced-concrete structure built in 1980 with modern conveniences. Having timed my excursion with the weekly observatory shift change and re-provisioning, I would reach the summit in a snowcat with three weather observers fresh from a week off, plus a married couple who had volunteered to prepare all the meals for a few weeks.

The observatory was having a banner year for extreme conditions. Two months earlier, on February 4, the temperature dipped to 47 degrees below zero, matching a record that had held for nine decades. During that bitter-cold day, 127-mile-per-hour wind gusts produced an impossible-to-imagine windchill of minus 109 degrees.

In preparing for my visit, I carefully followed the daunting packing list compiled by the MWOBS staff, creating my own small mountain of snow pants, hats, long underwear, goggles, mittens and gloves, snow boots, and a sleeping bag on my living room floor. The century of product development since 1934 was reassuring: Unlike the trio’s “Byrd cloth” parkas and pants, which were made of a densely woven cotton cloth promoted by polar explorer Richard Byrd, my gear was fabricated from light-but-tough synthetic fabrics filled with very fine strands of polyester microfibers.

During the week leading up to my trip, I had tracked the mountaintop forecast via the observatory’s website, and there were some promising signs that a storm might come through. But when we finally reached treeline in the snowcat, I saw that much of the Mount Washington Auto Road had been cleared of snow in anticipation of opening in late May. As we climbed, we encountered some sections that were still frozen, and I felt grateful for the spiked tractor treads that rumbled under us, sinking their steel teeth into the thick ice.

Arriving at the summit at noon, we were greeted by wind blowing up to 100 miles per hour—a sustained rush of air, like an indomitable river. To prevent the duffels and boxes of dried pasta, canned beans, and jars of peanut butter from being blown away, our driver backed the snowcat up to the service entrance of the MWOBS building so we could unload in its shelter.

I followed the staff down into the bowels of the building and tossed my duffel onto one of the two bunkbeds in my assigned room, named after McKenzie. It was like a ship’s cabin, cramped and dark. It was impossible to see through the cabin’s small, heavily reinforced window; like nearly all the rest in the building, it had long been sandblasted by rushing winds and the debris they carried.

The room was chilly. I snuggled down into my sleeping bag and began re-reading World Record Wind: Measuring Gusts of 231 Miles an Hour, McKenzie’s 1984 account of that incredible day. The slim volume is filled with log entries made a century ago, when he and the other observers felt, heard, and recorded a wind like no other. As I read, I listened to that constant, muscular, unearthly wind, like the dull roar of an airborne ocean.

* * * * *

The catalyst for Mount Washington’s official winter occupation in the 1930s was a call by the Second International Polar Year Commission to “record continuously the variations of all the meteorological elements” at high altitudes around the planet. Scientists hoped that by logging the conditions and analyzing data “at levels uncontaminated by local irregularities and peculiarities on the earth’s surface,” they would unlock the secret of the atmosphere in its entirety.

But if there was something significant happening a couple of miles up, only mountaintop observers would be close enough to gain a clear picture of the engine driving the planet’s weather. Mount Washington was a particularly desirable location for a weather station because it was accessible: close to civilization, with a cog railway and an auto road that could facilitate provisioning the weather observers with coal, gasoline, kerosene, and food.

At the time, scientists understood little about the larger forces that create droughts, hurricanes, and deluges, but some were gathering clues. In 1926, Japanese scientist Wasaburo Ooishi had published a report about a phenomenon he had observed while launching weather balloons near Mount Fuji. When released, the balloons would float up thousands of feet, then inevitably be swept east by a powerful and consistent westerly that appeared to blow more than 200 miles per hour—faster than any wind yet recorded on the planet.

By the 1930s, more accurate weather forecasting was seen as a way to build a more robust economy. While aviation was in its infancy, people were already imagining an era of passenger flights, which of course would be vulnerable to atmospheric shifts. Better weather forecasting would also benefit agriculture, trade, and shipping.

It took World War II for meteorologists to understand the general workings of the earth’s atmosphere. Pilots flying at high altitudes not only confirmed what Ooishi had discovered (and the Mount Washington observers had recorded), but also offered a picture of its strength and magnitude. There was a river of air up there, they said, with such a strong current that when they flew against it, they practically stood still.

What the pilots found was the jet stream, the heartbeat of the world. That rush of air that sends hats flying and forest fire smoke billowing across the sky is part of a complex system of ever-changing air pockets pushed around the globe by four serpentine currents that ring our planet: one near each pole, and two closer to the equator. These are the whooshing, spinning spirit of the world, forever moving about us, nourishing and cleansing the earth. There’s simply nothing else that so completely ties us together, everywhere, all at once.

Sitting at 44 degrees north, the Northeast’s highest peak feels the direct effects of this mighty river, as the northern polar jet stream meanders north, south, and over its location. And because Mount Washington lies in the path of major storm tracks traveling west to east across North America, those winds can pick up remarkable speed as they race unchecked over roughly 1,500 miles before charging up the northwestern slope of the mountain. 

One more fascinating reason that Mount Washington experiences some of the world’s worst weather: When that massive volume of wild air howls up to the summit, it finds itself squeezed under the tropopause, the invisible boundary between the two lowest layers of our atmosphere. Compression then compounds the wind’s speed, similar to what happens when you put your thumb over the end of a garden hose. As a result, winter winds atop Mount Washington regularly exceed 100 miles per hour and the temperatures drop well below zero. And because the jet stream also sweeps up all manner of small, local weather systems in its path, storms can barrel into the White Mountains seemingly without warning, surprising unfortunate climbers who looked up an hour ago and only saw blue sky.

* * * * *

All that winter of 1933–1934, Pagliuca, Stephenson, and McKenzie recorded the mountain’s many moods. They kept their equipment running, jotted down their findings, and sheltered adventure seekers who had braved the elements to reach the summit. They also spent an inordinate amount of time feeding kerosene and coal into their stove and generator.

On April 11, there was much life inside their minuscule cabin. The trio had been joined by two friends of Pagliuca who’d climbed the mountain the day before, plus three cats and five newborn kittens (feline residents have remained a constant presence at the summit ever since).

Throughout that day, the weather gave ominous signs. In the morning, a wind stirred from the southeast, sending ice crystals sweeping across the blue sky in the form of wispy cirrus clouds. The idea of a weather “front” was brand-new, its nomenclature an artifact of its discovery right after World War I. The phenomenon was first proposed by Norwegian scientist Vilhelm Bjerknes, who argued that weather was dictated by the movements of cold and warm pockets of air swirling around the planet. When they banged up against each other, he wrote, that’s when we experience all the gifts and punishments of the skies.

Bjerknes’s observations and mathematical analyses of these systems had shifted meteorologists’ interest from the barometer to the sky, and Pagliuca read the clouds as portents. On that morning, he stood on the summit of Mount Washington, gazed clear to the Maine coast, and pronounced it an “emissary sky.” A few hours later, stratocumulus clouds gathered into a dome above the mountain, then settled down and enveloped them.

Carried from the east by high winds, these clouds brought “rough frost,” wrote McKenzie. Quite different from the dry rime to which they were accustomed, it created a dangerous dampness for the men going about their chores on the exposed mountaintop. Rough frost, McKenzie wrote, “tended to permeate our garments and then freeze into a thin ice armor.”

Throughout the day, McKenzie maintained radio contact with colleagues at the Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts some 180 miles away, as well as amateur radio enthusiasts following the weather in the surrounding country. The barometer in the cabin continued to drop, and wind speeds increased to 124 miles per hour. The men were both anxious and excited to see what this storm had in store for them. After evening chores, everyone but McKenzie climbed into the attic to nestle under blankets close to the warm stovepipe.

All night, the wind assaulted the cabin, sending the anemometer pen zigzagging madly across the record sheet and shaking the door in its frame. Arctic blasts splintered through cracks in the window sash; the stove struggled to give warmth. The cats, the smartest of all creatures, piled into a cozy feline mound in a box on a shelf behind the stove.

The wind shook the building with every gust, threatening to tear it from its mooring and hurl it into the ether. Although experience had taught the men to trust their shelter, now insulated with a foot of ice all around, they listened even in their sleep for the terrifying sound of a snapped chain.

Before dawn on the morning of April 12, 1934, Stephenson awoke, acutely aware of the bellowing wind. His instruments claimed it was blowing at only 105, but the sounds outside were like nothing he’d heard before. Ice must have built up on the anemometer overnight, disrupting accurate recording. He had to knock it free.

Fumbling in the dark and cold, Stephenson climbed into his snow suit, tucking the inner skirt of his parka into his snow pants. Wearing thick, gauntlet-like gloves, he tugged at the handle of the cabin door, but the rushing wind created a vacuum so strong he had to fight to open it; when he finally stepped outside, bracing himself as usual for the northwesterlies, he found himself face-down in the snow. A southeasterly blast had upended him from behind. Stephenson recovered and, with great effort, climbed to the roof of the cabin with a wooden club he used to knock the anemometer free of ice. The moment he loosened his grip on his stick, the wind swept it away.

A hurricane-style storm was well under way. Later that morning, Pagliuca wrote in his diary that they’d logged several 172-mile-per-hour gusts. While he was riveted to the wind speed recorder, the rest of the crew kept busy. There was work to be done, a welcome distraction from that confounded wind and the chilling thought that the cabin might, at some point, be blown to smithereens. The stove in the kitchen was rigged to generate electricity to help keep the anemometer free of ice. It gulped kerosene, so the volunteers chipped the 55-gallon drum free of ice to refill it.

As the day wore on, everyone was “beginning to be a bit edgy,” wrote McKenzie. Cabin fever was setting in, compounded by the relentless wind. Before noon, he was astonished to see the highly reinforced window behind the stove bulging inward during gusts. They were now timing speeds of 220 and occasionally 229 miles per hour. No one knew how long the cabin could stand against that kind of force.

Then, at 1:21 p.m. on April 12, 1934, the extreme value of 231 miles per hour out of the southeast was recorded. “Twice I yelled the time so that [my companion] could put it down on paper,” wrote Pagliuca in the official logbook. He then seized his slide rule to extrapolate his calibration curve once again and confirm what he had witnessed. It was true.

Pagliuca could not contain his awe. “We had measured by means of an anemometer the highest natural wind velocity ever recorded officially anywhere in the world.” He added, “Will they believe it?”

* * * * *

I awoke with a knock. Cocooned in my sleeping bag, I’d slept away the afternoon, dreaming of the smoky cabin half-buried in snowdrifts. Jay Broccolo, director of weather operations, was ready to take me into the wind, and again I became aware of its pervasive drone. I zipped and fastened layers upon layers of gear, then huffed and puffed up the concrete silo’s three-story ladder, following Broccolo to the roof. As we climbed higher, the entire structure shivered and groaned with pressure of the wind. At the top of the ladder, Broccolo pulled open the small exterior door, and I crouched to follow him through.

When I stood up, I was relieved to see that a waist-high wall protected the outdoor walkway that skirted the silo. Without it, I’d be pinned against the wall. Even so, all my senses recalibrated to withstand the blast. Broccolo had told me to put my ski goggle strap over my hat, which was the only reason both were still on my head. I gazed northwest, straight into the wind, then west where the horizon glowed faintly from the last rays of our distant sun. Broccolo motioned for me to follow him around to the lee of the silo, and in that sheltered place, I barely heard him as he called out the snowy mountain peaks before us.

Then he pointed up one half-flight to the highest point of the observatory, where two pitot tube anemometers stood in the wind on slender legs, like sandpipers. He motioned that I should go up to experience the full force of the wind.

I hesitated, then seized the ladder and stepped onto the first rung. When I reached up to shake hands with the wind gods, they knocked my arm back. Determined now, I kept going, crawling onto the three-foot-wide platform, girded with a circular handrail. With difficulty, I stood up, grabbed hold, and faced straight into the winds.

They rushed by, as they have for hundreds of millions of years. In their embrace, I felt the sublime, like stargazing on a cloudless night, shivering in the absolute freedom that I am nothing, of no consequence. The winds raced on, over and around me—a mere twig in their path—on their journey across oceans and continents. I stood there for an eternity, marveling at the force of creation.

To learn more about the Mount Washington Observatory’s weather work, complete with webcams and daily logs, go to mountwashington.org.