Mount Washington is notorious for having the world’s worst weather. The New Hampshire peak can be frigid, with temperatures dipping as low as 50 degrees below zero. It’s snowy, with over 49 inches once falling in a single day. It’s regularly blanketed in rime ice, formed from freezing fog. Most of all, it’s exceedingly windy.
On April 12, 1934, weather observers at the summit recorded wind gusts of 231 miles per hour—a world record that was not broken until decades later.
To this day, Mount Washington holds the U.S. (and Northern Hemisphere) wind speed record, as well as the record for fastest wind speed ever measured at a staffed weather station. By comparison, no U.S. hurricane has ever topped 190 mph.
Mount Washington's Extreme Location
Rising 6,288 feet above sea level, Mount Washington is the tallest peak in the northeastern United States. Located in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, it stands at the confluence of multiple storm tracks, which bring hurricane-force winds over 100 days per year. The climate is so severe, in fact, that the treeless, higher elevations of Mount Washington host certain plant and animal species more commonly found in the Arctic tundra than New England.
Paradoxically, Mount Washington is also a major attraction, with tourist amenities that include a cafeteria, museum, visitor center, post office, gift shops and restrooms at the summit. Hundreds of thousands of visitors arrive each year, having either hiked, driven (or biked) the auto road, or ridden the cog railway to the top. On the clearest days, the view extends to Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Quebec and the Atlantic Ocean.
“It’s spectacular,” says Randi Minetor, author of the book Death on Mount Washington: Stories of Accidents and Foolhardiness on the Northeast’s Highest Peak. “You are going to get a view of New England you can’t get anywhere else.”
As Minetor’s book suggests, not everyone comes prepared. Since 1849, around 150 people have died on the mountain—the victims of falls, avalanches, hypothermia, heart attacks and, in one instance, a horse-drawn coach accident. These deaths have ranged from accomplished mountaineers and backcountry skiers to beginner hikers in shorts who got caught in storms.
“They think they’re going up for a pleasant walk,” Minetor says, “but it can be 70 degrees at the bottom and 25 degrees at the top.” She adds that “dramatic weather changes” are commonplace, and that strong summit winds can make it difficult to stand up even on relatively calm summer days.
Mount Washington’s extreme weather has long been known to the area’s residents. Some of its Indigenous names have been translated as “Hidden Mountain in the Clouds” and “Mother Goddess of the Storm.” In the late 1700s, pastor Jeremy Belknap wrote that “extreme cold” threatened to “freeze the traveler” and render the summit “inaccessible” even “in the midst of summer.”
Mount Washington Observatory
The U.S. Army Signal Corps (then known as the Signal Service) operated a weather station atop Mount Washington for several years in the late 1800s. Then, in 1932, the Mount Washington Observatory opened in a small wooden building that was chained to the mountaintop to keep it from blowing away, according to Peter Crane, the Mount Washington Observatory’s curator. Though researchers planned on staying for just one winter, Crane says, they were “quite successful” and decided to keep it going. The observatory remains in operation today.
Crane explained that the observatory’s early researchers could take measurements from inside the building, where a coal stove provided heat. But they often needed to climb an outdoor ladder in very high winds to clear ice from the mast and cables that supported their anemometer, an instrument that measures wind speed. “I just marvel at the strength and the courage of those crew members,” Crane says, pointing out that “they didn’t have the outdoor clothing we do today.”
The 1934 Record Wind
As is typical for Mount Washington, the storm that would break the wind speed record came on suddenly. Electrical engineer Salvatore Pagliuca, one of the observatory’s three researchers at the time, wrote in his logbook that the morning of April 11, 1934, dawned clear, with views stretching all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Later that day, however, the clouds rolled in, the atmospheric pressure dropped, ice began to form and the wind picked up. By early the next morning, “there was no doubt … that a super-hurricane, Mt. Washington style, was in full development,” wrote Pagliuca, who was joined on the mountaintop by radio technician Alexander McKenzie and repairman Wendell Stephenson, as well as by two guests and several cats. (A fourth researcher had just departed after suffering a skiing injury.)
“Everyone in the house was ‘mobilized’ as during a war attack and assigned a job,” Pagliuca wrote. He explained that as the three researchers monitored the weather instruments, particularly a heated anemometer custom-built for use on Mount Washington, the two guests chipped in by clearing off snow, cooking and tending the fire.
At one point, Stephenson opened the door on his way to de-ice the anemometer mast with a club, only to be knocked flat by the wind. “Used to bracing himself against the prevailing northwesterlies, the southeasterly wind of that storm sneaked up behind him,” McKenzie later wrote.
In such conditions, “it was dangerous to run with the wind,” McKenzie wrote. “If you do that, you can never stop when you want to, and maybe not at all.” One must walk in a crouch and use rocks and structures as wind blockers, he noted.
By 7:45 a.m. on April 12, wind gusts of up to 168 mph were being recorded. From 12:25 p.m. to 12:30 p.m., the wind averaged 188 mph, with gusts above 200 mph. As the building shook, Stephenson recorded a high of 229 mph, after which Pagliuca took the stopwatch and timed two gusts of 231 mph.
“’Will they believe it?’ was our first thought,” Pagliuca wrote. “I felt then the full responsibility of that startling measurement. Was my timing correct? Was the method OK? Was the calibration curve right? Was the stopwatch accurate?”
After quickly confirming the calculations, Pagliuca wrote of the group’s excitement at having measured “the highest natural wind velocity ever recorded officially anywhere in the world.”
Over the next few decades, Mount Washington would occasionally come close to losing its record. Wind speeds over 200 mph were recorded on Greenland, on Japan’s Mount Fuji and on Longs Peak in Colorado. The record was finally bested on April 10, 1996, when an unmanned weather station on Australia’s Barrow Island recorded 253 mph winds in the midst of Tropical Cyclone Olivia.
It’s believed that wind speeds in tornadoes might be even faster, reaching more than 300 mph. But those have been estimates, taken with Doppler radar, rather than direct measurements with anemometers.
Despite losing the record, Mount Washington has maintained its reputation as a bad weather mecca. In 2014, an observatory intern reportedly got frostbite on his nose after less than 30 seconds outside. And in February 2023, temperatures on the mountain plummeted to minus 47 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of minus 108 degrees.
“It was wicked cold,” Crane says. Nonetheless, he recalls one of the observers saying at the time, “This is what we live for. I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life.”
