Being Unprepared
BY Herschel Smith
5 hours, 53 minutes ago
Over 20 “ill-prepared” hikers were rescued from New Hampshire’s Mount Washington after they were trapped in “full winter conditions” without the proper gear, with some developing hypothermia, according to the Mount Washington Cog Railway.
The hikers, who were rescued on Saturday by railway officials, had reached the mountain’s 6,288-foot summit, but “most had no idea that summit services would be unavailable and that the state park was closed for the season,” Andy Vilaine, the assistant general manager for the Mount Washington Cog Railway, said in a statement on Saturday.
The train was heading to the summit as normal when crew members discovered “several distressed hikers,” Vilaine said in a statement to ABC News.
Some of the hikers even admitted it was “their first hike ever,” Vilaine said.
Near the summit, temperatures on Saturday reached roughly between 15 to 18 degrees, with a wind chill anywhere between minus 5 and zero degrees, Vilaine said.
Train crew members created space “anywhere we could” for the hikers, with some even placed in locomotive cabs “with the heat on full-blast so they could start to reverse the effects of hypothermia,” Vilaine said.
Imagine being so stupid that you use Mount Washington for your first hike ever, where the record low was measured at -50 degrees F, wind speeds achieve ~ 100 MPH, the wind chill is regularly in the range of -80 to -100 degrees F, and the weather is too severe to sustain plant life at all.
I have grown to love my KUIU gear while hunting (I just decided that I was tired of being cold and wet and I deserved better), and I wouldn’t have even done that this time of the year with all of it on in layers.
On November 4, 2025 at 12:20 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
Mount Washington is famous in meteorological circles as the site of the long-time mark for the highest wind speed ever recorded, namely on April 12, 1934, staff members of a weather station atop the mountain recorded winds reaching 231 mph. That record stood for many years until Tropical Cyclone Olivia reached 254 mph at Australia’s Barrow Island. If memory serves, the Mt. Washington mark still stands as the record for the northern hemisphere.