We left the trailhead at 4:30am. Headlamps on, temperature at minus nine, the sky still fully black above the tree line. I could hear the wind before I could feel it, a low sustained roar working down from the ridge. The mountain was awake and indifferent. This is the thing about Washington in February. It doesn't acknowledge you. It doesn't care that you drove up from central Massachusetts, that you've done this before, that you're prepared. It just is what it is. You either move through it or you turn around.
I've been making this push for close to twenty years. Winter ascents of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, the whole Presidential range in conditions that anywhere else would halt everything. Up here they're just February. You either learn to move in it or you stop coming. Most people stop coming. The ones who don't, there's something different in them. Something the mountain put there.
Above Treeline
The trees end and the world changes completely. Below treeline you're in something, contained, sheltered, the wind muffled by spruce and fir. Above it you're exposed to the full reality of the Presidential Range in winter, which is one of the most genuinely rugged places in the eastern United States. The wind at summit elevation regularly exceeds hurricane force. The rime ice builds on every surface, rocks, sign posts, the observatory itself, in formations that look otherworldly, thick white crystals growing sideways into the wind like something out of Antarctica.
On this particular morning the wind was out of the northwest and the gusts were hitting 70 knots on the cone. Every step had to be deliberate, crampons planted, body angled into the wind, moving in the brief lulls between gusts. My partner Dave and I didn't talk much above treeline. There wasn't much to say that the mountain wasn't already saying louder.
First Light from the Top of New England
We hit the summit cone at around 6:45am, just as the sky to the east began its transition. What happens to light at 6,288 feet in February is hard to describe to someone who hasn't seen it. The darkness doesn't lift gradually, it breaks. One moment the horizon is a deep, bruised purple. Then a line of orange appears, thin as a wire, and then the whole thing opens up: pink bleeding into gold, the cloud layer below us lit from underneath like a lantern, and through a break in the weather to the southeast, unmistakably, the Atlantic Ocean.
On a clear winter morning from the summit of Washington you can see the ocean. Not a suggestion of it, you can see it. The light catches it fifty, sixty miles away, a flat silver glint at the edge of the world. Standing on granite at minus twenty-five, wind trying to take you off your feet, watching the Atlantic catch fire at sunrise, this is what the Northeast holds for the people willing to go get it. It is not a casual thing. It is not a comfortable thing. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and I have seen it more than once, and it stops me cold every time.
What the Mountain Is
Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast and it wears that distinction seriously. The weather station at the summit held the world record for directly observed wind speed, 231 miles per hour, for over sixty years. People die up here. Not often, but regularly enough that the mountain has earned its reputation honestly. The Presidential Range doesn't bluff.
What it offers in return for that respect is something you cannot buy or shortcut your way to. The ruggedness is the point. The exposure is the point. The fact that it is genuinely hard, genuinely dangerous if you're unprepared, genuinely indifferent to your plans, that's what makes the summit mean something. Standing up there in February light, the ocean visible to the south, the wind trying to pull you sideways, the whole of New England laid out below you, that means something. It always has. It always will.