It's cold outside my Brooklyn apartment and I'm debating whether to bolster my interior heat core with a bacon and eggs from the Academy. The temperature is 19F. Cold, but I've been colder. -40F atop Wildcat Mountain across from My. Washington. The year was 1971. The chairlift operator warned that that our run would be it for the day. The cold was causing malfunctions with the chain drive atop the summit. John Gilmore, Tommy Jordan, and I decided to brave the weather and cruised in the gondola car to the top. Ski equipment back then was good to zero. Halfway up we were questioning the wisdom of this late-afternoon run.
The gondola car was swinging in the ragged wind. The visibility was zero from a low ground fog. No one else was on the slope.
"No stops on the way down." Tommy Jordan was the best skier of us.
"Unless one of us fall." John was second best. His father was a doctor. His parka was fluffed with goose down.
"No stops." I wore a thin shell with two sweaters. "And no falling. Upper Wildcat and then Middle Wildcat."
We agreed without any further discussion. That route was the fastest way to the bottom.
We burst from the gondola like Olympic skiers on the grand slalom. Tommy took the early lead, but John and I were fighting for a close second. Our lungs were frozen by the first turning. My ears were numb within a minute. The wind and speed combined with the cold to inhumanly frigid conditions. My tears formed ice inside my goggles. I followed my two friends and four minutes later we ran into the ski lodge.
It took about ten minutes to thaw out our extremities.
We had a brandy and loaded our gear into my VW Bug. Its air-cooled engine was the only one to start in the parking lot. We drove back to North Conway happy to have survived that trial on the trail, however Mount Washington's fierce weather reputation was assaulted this week by a claim from Australia that the wind during a typhoon in 1996 gusted faster than the old record of 231 mph registered at New Hampshire's highest peak in 1934. A previous challenger from Guam in 1997 had been refuted due to a faulty anemometer and I'm not convinced that the 1996 measurement at Barrow Island was the worst, because I've been atop Mount Washington in the summer and it was not close to summer at the summit.
Not back in 1959 and not now.
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