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Mount Washington Weather | |
| New England has its own little arctic weather zone, with the fastest winds ever recorded on earth. | ||
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No New England forecasts or generalizations apply to the weather on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. This highest peak in New England (6288 ft, 1917 meters) is said to have the worst weather in all the USA. New Englanders delight in exchanging horror stories of the latest report of extreme weather: winds of 150 miles per hour (the record is 211 mph/340 kph!), temperatures of -47°F/-99°C, wind-chill factors that don't seem earthly. Regional news media often carry the reports even though they don't really affect anyone but the forlorn weather forecasters at the Mount Washington Observatory who have to sit through the storms on the mountaintop. If you hike to the summit of Mount Washington, weather considerations become extraordinarily important, and may actually make the difference between life and death, as hikers caught and paralyzed by severe weather suffer fatalities every few years. By the way, the most-fun way to reach the summit is by the Mount Washington Cog Railway, departing from Fabyan, between Bretton Woods and Twin Mountain on the north side of Mount Washington, not far from the famous Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods.
—by Tom Brosnahan
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Above, a locomotive
from the Mount
Washington Cog Railway rests
in dense fog after chugging up the steep
grade to the summit. |
