Mount Washington

They chained the observatory to the mountain, which tells you most of what you need to know about Mount Washington. In 1934 the summit weather station measured a wind gust of 231 miles per hour, a world record that stood for sixty-two years and is still the fastest wind ever observed outside a tropical cyclone. The mountain itself is 6,288 feet tall, modest by western standards. But the Presidential Range funnels three storm tracks into one collision zone, and at some point somebody looked at this hill in New Hampshire and concluded, correctly, that the building should be bolted down.

This map reveals the mountain’s true topographic character: the steep headwalls of Tuckerman and Huntington Ravines, the long ridgelines connecting the Presidential peaks, and the network of glacial cirques carved into the eastern face. The Great Gulf, the largest of these cirques, opens to the north between Washington and the northern Presidentials. The contour lines tell a story of ice age forces that shaped one of the most dramatic alpine landscapes east of the Rockies.