08/28/2026
💨 On April 12, 1934, four men in a wooden shack chained to a mountaintop in New Hampshire measured a wind gust of 231 miles per hour and genuinely expected the building to leave.
The crew at the Mount Washington Observatory had set up in the old Stage Office on the summit, a low wooden structure held down with heavy iron chains bolted into the rock. The gusts climbed all morning. Observer Sal Pagliuca, radio man Alexander McKenzie and the others took turns going outside to knock rime ice off the anemometer, which is roughly as unpleasant as it sounds. When the needle hit 231, Pagliuca wrote in the log, will they believe it?
They did. The instrument was later hauled to the National Weather Bureau in Washington and tested, and the reading held. It stood as the fastest surface wind ever recorded on earth until 1996, when an unmanned station on Barrow Island in Australia logged 253 during a cyclone. Mount Washington still holds the record for the highest surface wind ever observed directly by human beings, which is a different and arguably better distinction. ❄️
What is the worst wind you have ever been out in here, and where were you when it hit?
