The original crew of the Mt. Washington Observatory includes (from left) Alex McKenzie, Bob Monahan, Joe Dodge, and Sal Pagliuca. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

PINKHAM NOTCH — Joe Dodge was a young outdoorsman with a marriage to the mountains and an outsize affection for extreme weather when he and three fellow trekkers ascended the carriage trail to the summit of Mt. Washington in pursuit of history, science, and public service. The year was 1932. America was plunged in Depression, and Dodge—who’d cemented a reputation constructing a hut system for hikers across New Hampshire’s North Country—was undaunted by the snowcapped slab of granite that lay ahead. Instead, he believed in the value the notoriously hostile summit held in the field of weather observation and public education. So with little more than borrowed weather instruments and enough food, coal and curiosity to survive the journey, Dodge and his friends Sal Pagliuca, Bob Monahan, and Alex McKenzie scaled the 6,288-foot peak that fall to reopen a tiny weather station last run by the U.S. Army’s Signal Service in the 1880s. They would enter a completely different world up there—and over the course of the coming years, the record books as well.

The stone-walled Tip Top House was lone of two simple hotels that served summit visitors from the 1850s into the 1870s. The Tip Top House still stands today, operated as an historic site by Mount Washington State Park. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

On April 12, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were in the midst of a legendary crime wave, Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” was the #1 movie in America, and in Pinkham Notch, a large ridge of high pressure was barreling across Mt. Washington’s icy summit, violently rattling the windows of the team’s tiny outpost and pushing their instruments to the brink of endurance. By the time it was over, Dodge and his team—subsisting on a $500 grant from the state’s Academy of Science—had recorded wind gusts of 231 mph, the strongest ever observed by humans. “There was no doubt this morning that a super-hurricane, Mt. Washington style, was in full development,” Pagliuca wrote in his logbook. “‘Will they believe it?’ was our first thought. I felt then the responsibility of that startling measurement.” The storm would last just one day, but the legend and Granite State tradition it created live on three quarters of a century later in an institution and landscape like no other—a place that proudly declares itself “home of the world’s worst weather.” The Mt. Washington Observatory has indeed evolved beyond the tiny shack Dodge, his team and five felines occupied in those early years to become a world-class facility, the only permanently-staffed mountaintop observatory in the Western Hemisphere, with a mission based in research, observation, and education. “Joe [Dodge] was always very interested in public education, particularly with respect to Mt. Washington,” says Jack Middleton, a Manchester attorney who served as an observer in 1952 and went on to ask for Dodge’s daughter’s hand in marriage. “It was a spectacular geographic feature, it was home to some incredible weather, and the summit itself is such a unique place. The flora and fauna you find up there are actually replicated in Greenland. You would have to go a long way to find anything like it.”

Sal Pagliuca (left) and Alex McKenzie take advantage of good weather in 1932 to strenghten the guy wires holding the roof anemometer on the Mt. Washington Observator y. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observator y).

In the midst of constantly emerging technology and methods of gathering weather, the summit itself has remained remarkably the same in the 75 years since Joe Dodge’s perfect storm—a subarctic and often unforgiving climate above the clouds, a sort of no-man’s land in the cold season where winds can regularly top 100 mph, snow falls each month of the year, temperatures can fluctuate between 60° F in the summer to -50° F in the dead of winter, and thick rime ice (or wind-blown frozen fog) can coat surfaces at a clip of six inches per hour. Mt. Washington observers—whose measurements of temperature, humidity, and wind speed are routed directly to the National Weather Service— jokingly pride themselves on being called “the world’s worst weather observers” or some of its “highest paid meteorologists.” As such, the summit is a place that has always lent itself to real-world research. The Army Signal Service would, of course, use the summit throughout the 1870s and 1880s to offer forecasts to merchants, ship owners, farmers and others whose livelihoods depended on the weather; while the Air Force would use it some 60 years later—as WWII was closing and the Cold War was escalating —to research the effect of icing on airplane wings in the event of flights into frigid Russian airspace. Advertising companies used the summit’s high winds to test the endurance of their signs; while as early as the 1950s, inventors were bringing contraptions to the top of the mountain to research the conversion of wind into energy communicate on short wave radio at bands that hadn’t been discovered before.

Above the 4,000-foot tree line, Mt. Washington shifts from wooded rusticity to a stark palette of black and white, every surface shrouded in fog, snow and rim ice. (Photo: David Lazar.)

“It has always been a platform, a place for people to do research on what would work in adverse weather conditions,” Middleton says.

The Observatory first occupied by Dodge, Monahan, Pagliuca and MacKenzie dated back to the weather bureau of the U.S. Army’s Signal Service in the 1800s. (Photos courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

It’s also a place where visitors can enjoy views, depending on fog, of more than 90 miles in any direction, from the Atlantic, to the entire Presidential Range, the Monadnocks, and the Adirondacks. First climbed in the 17th century, the summit was named in 1784 for General, not President, George Washington. “So esteemed was he at that time that the highest peak in the colonies was chosen to bear the name of our greatest war hero,” the Observatory’s curator Peter Crane says. “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” And first in tourism. Each spring, summer and fall, more than 250,000 hikers, tourists, and bumper sticker-seeking motorists make the ascent up the Mount Washington Auto Road, the same dramatic, winding ribbon of roadway (built in 1861 as a carriage trail) that brought Dodge’s team and before them, the Signal Corps, to the summit. The ascent is breathtaking, arguably more so in winter, when the road is closed and access is offered through the Observatory’s winter DayTrips and EduTrips via snow tractor—a program that provides an exclusive window into the Observatory’s inner workings and to the region’s most arresting vistas. About 2,000 people reach the summit in the cold season. It is a terrain that above the 4,000-foot tree line transforms from wooded rusticity to a stark palette of black and white, every tree and surface shrouded in snow, fog or rime ice; a terrain that magnifies man’s smallness in the face of nature. At the summit itself, the landscape can border on polar or downright postapocalyptic— from the Cog Railway (Sylvester Marsh’s spectacular 1869 contraption for transporting tourists up the mountainside) to its rebuilt stage office (still chained to the ground), and the Tip Top House (the stone lodge built in 1854 that for many years housed Observatory employees), no structure is spared a burial in rime ice. But for the occasional hiker, tourist, or Marty, the Observatory’s celebrated feline mascot, signs of life are all but nonexistent.

In the winter, the Mt. Washington Observatory offers special DayTrip and EduTrip tours to the summit via snow tractor, led by historians like Peter Crane, an accomplished trekker who’s scaled every 4,000 foot summit in the Presidential Range in every month of the year. (Photos: David Lazar).

“Our education programs really try and connect people with a place that is otherwise incredibly remote,” says the Observatory’s executive director Scot Henley. “For New Englanders and people from abroad, this is that one crazy outlier they see on their weather reports—the 32 degree reading when every other place around it is 72. It gives them the opportunity to experience that one digit on the map, to meet our meteorologists, and to find out for themselves, ‘What exactly can Mother Nature dish out up there?’” In the years since Dodge and his team observed their world record windstorm, Mother Nature has apparently dished out even worse weather elsewhere. This past January, the world learned of a 1996 tropical cyclone off the northeast coast of Australia that reports suggest reached wind speeds of 253 mph. The news, while a blow

Then as now, observers atop Mt. Washington have always experimented with new instruments for measuring weather, including this heated thermometer in 1937. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

to the pride of Granite Staters who’d enjoyed the exclusivity of such an unlikely honor, was tempered, they argue, by the fact that the Australian cyclone was not observed by humans. For retired observers like Goreham’s Guy Gosselin, who scaled the mountain in 1961 and personally endured the ferocity of 184 mph winds, that’s no small distinction. “It is truly an eye-opening experience,” says Gosselin, who retired in 1996 as the Observatory’s executive director. “The weather was awesome in the dictionary sense… it also takes a lot out of you. You’re in a constant battle with wind and temperature. At times, you pretty much have to crawl along. “I don’t think you can leave there without an appreciation for the experience of being in a very unusual climate,” he continues. “It doesn’t make any difference what the weather happens to be whileyou’re up there. It’s always going to be a very different environment… Joe Dodge’s first love was the weather. The Observatory and the work it has been able to accomplish remain a great tribute to him and his vision.” It is a vision—and a view—that, thanks to Dodge and his fellow trekkers, will continue to connect visitors with awe and wonder for generations to come.

Each tourist season, more than 250,000 visitors make the hike or drive to the Mt. Washington summit. In the (winter, those numbers drop to 2,000. The cold season transforms the summit into one part winter wonderland, one part lunar landscape, affording views of up to 90 miles and an experience like no other in New England. Structures, from the stage house of the Cog Railway, to the radio towers of WHOM and WPKQ are buried in rim ice, rendering them all but unrecognizable. (Photos: David Lazar)