Adventioneering

Living in Vermont for a couple of years I formed the impression that, compared to the pacific time-zone, Vermont doesn’t really have mountains. New Hampshire gets a pass though; they do in fact have real mountains, if a bit tame. What is decidedly not tame is Mt. Washington.

The Mt. Washington auto road is how you get up in a vehicle, and the setup is a tourist trap. The price was $20USD per vehicle and driver and $7 for each additional passenger. They give you a CD that you can listen to on the way up and down; I only survived about 37 seconds of this trite production. Read the wiki page about Mt. Washington instead. Luckily for the environment, you can drop the CDs off at the bottom when you leave.

Even though the Mt. Washington road and summit are a total tourist trap, this doesn’t manage to detract from the amazement of going from a nice calm 17 degree day to -1 degrees with 86kph winds – a wind-chill somewhere around -11; in as long as it takes you to drive up the short, winding road to the 1916 meter summit.

We had goretex shells thankfully, or it would have been a truly miserable experience, although I wish I had brought my wind-stopper gloves. I think you could really make an afternoon of it (and I imagine attract a lot of attention) by setting a table up there and trying to have lunch. Like mosquitoes and black-flies, the tourists are repelled by the cold.

The epic conditions have made me very interested to camp there in winter, or particularly try to make a push up to the summit when the road is closed and nobody but other climbers are likely to be there. More information (and dire warnings) about such fool-hardy efforts can be found at the Mount Washington Observatory website.

I’m tempted to try to take a Buddi-Pole or something up there, and work some amateur radio. I doubt I’d be the first, but I am surprised I haven’t run across stories of people doing this already.