Vibe-Winter-2425 - Flipbook - Page 62
“No two days are
exactly the same”
I
n his 19 years serving as a weather observer for the Mount
Washington Observatory, Ryan Knapp has seen it all.
He’s seen 10-foot snow drifts piled against the walls of the
Sherman Adams Building. He’s experienced minus-40-degree
temperatures with a wind chill of 101 below. He’s seen clear days
with a view 130 miles in every direction, and starry nights when
the aurora borealis danced above the Presidential Range.
“No two days are exactly the same,” says Knapp, who currently
works the overnight shift at the summit observatory. “What’s nice
about this job is you do the forecast in the morning, you wake
up in the evening, and you’re out there experiencing what you
forecasted for.”
Still, some days are more memorable than others. Knapp
remembers clearly the night of February 24, 2019, when the wind
reached speeds of 171 miles per hour—a monthly record for the
Observatory, and his personal wind speed record during his years
on the summit.
“We sat down for dinner, and you could hear every wind that
was occurring,” he says. “We have a little monitor downstairs near
our dining table, and every time we heard
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a wind gust, we’d look at the monitor.”
But it’s what happened over the following days that cemented the event in Knapp’s memory. The Observatory, a nonprofit
organization that relies on donations and grants, offers overnight
EduTrips to members of the public. Guests typically head up the
mountain by snow cat on Mondays and leave the following day.
On this week, however, the persistent high winds combined with
nearly a foot of snow stranded the group on the summit, and
they were forced to spend an extra night. Knapp says there were
no complaints from guests, who’d been warned they may get to
witness “the world’s worst weather” firsthand.
“The next two days we had 123 miles per hour on the 26th–
and on the 27th, we had 103-mile-per-hour winds,” he says. “Not
very many people get to experience those kinds of winds, but
more importantly, survive those kinds of winds.”
After aborting its mission on Tuesday, the Observatory snow cat
was eventually able to retrieve the guests—and bring a fresh shift of
weather observers—on Wednesday. Scaling a 6,288-foot mountain
in winter is never easy, but Knapp explains how it can be particularly
treacherous in high winds. As the snow cat heads up the Mt. Washington Auto Road, the treads kick up snow, obscuring visibility as the
wind piles snow drifts in its path. A single trip can take hours, and
the arrival must be timed exactly right.
“All that snow was continuing to pile onto
the road, so it required a lot of blading
