Summitting Mt. Washington

Today we hiked to the summit of Mt. Washington, the highest peak in the northeast. Mt. Washington has the distinction of having the worst weather on earth. That is not the experience we wanted to have, so we watched the summit forecast very closely for several days. There is a major weather observatory atop Mt. Washington and great weather data is available. This day looked like the best: clear, sunny, mid 50s, 30 mph winds. While watching the forecast this week one day was predicted to be "clear but undercast" for the summit. This was a new one for me, but I think it means the sky is clear, looking up from the summit, but there is cloud cover below the summit. The highest surface wind ever recorded on earth was 231 mph on Mt. Washington. I expect that that record is due more to the fact that they have all that fancy monitoring equipment, than having higher winds than other peaks. Shoot, Grandfather Mountain probably gets winds that high, but their Radio Shack weather station blows away when the wind exceeds 125 mph.

We chose to hike up on the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail and return on the Jewell Trial, forming a loop about ten miles long. The trialhead is at EL2560', near the parking lot for the Cog Railway. The summit is at EL6288'. If you do the math, the gain is 3728, a fairly respectable climb. The hike actually was much easier than I expected. The Ammonoosuc Trail connected with the Crawford Path about a half mile below the summit. The Crawford Path is the oldest mountain hiking trial in America. It was laid out in 1819 and ends at the summit. As far as I could tell, only one other person hiked up the Ammonoosuc Trail this day. However, when we reached the summit, we saw perhaps a hundred other hikers. I assume they all came up the east side from Pinkham Notch. There were also about a gazillion tourist who came up on the Cog or on the Mt. Washington Auto Road. It is always disheartening to crest a significant summit and then have a tourist in flip flops take your picture and ask if you actually walked all the way up here. We stayed at the summit almost two hours before heading down. About 1/4 way down Dorcas turned her ankle. It wasn't very serious, but it caused her some discomfort and slowed us down a bit on the descent. We took about 4 hours going up and four hours coming down. It was a very rewarding hike. As forecast, the weather was great and the views were fantastic.