Weather observers stationed at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire took a “brief break” earlier this week to “enjoy” wintry conditions that saw winds top out at 175 kilometres an hour.
The observatory released a video Monday showing weather observers Mike Dorfman and Tom Padham battling insane winds that nearly lifted them off their feet.
The video shows Dorfman on the snow-covered summit being lifted by the wind and blown backwards, sending the man rolling on the ground.
“Wind on the summit is an experience that you can’t just describe to understand,” Dorfman said in a blog post accompanying the video. “It makes you fully appreciate that air is in fact a fluid and not empty space.
“It is really impossible to safely face down hundred-mile-per-hour winds almost anywhere else; you’d either be risking your life trying to hike into them (I was exhausted after several minutes of playing in the wind) or risking your life in a hurricane, where flying debris and shrapnel poses a huge threat,” Dorfman wrote.
Mount Washington is the highest point in the northeastern United States, topping out at 6,288 feet above sea level. The weather station is operated by two rotating crews who live on the summit a week at a time taking hourly weather observations.