When Tricia Hutton pictures paradise, the scene isn’t one you’d likely expect. Vast tundras, white-out blizzards, biting temperatures, and harsh cutting winds are her idea of the perfect place to live — and conduct research. She may have finally found her paradise on the summit of Mount Washington, known notoriously as “Home of the World’s Worst Weather.”
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Hutton’s fascination with winter weather began when she was a child, but it wasn’t until she came to Brockport that she realized she could turn her passion into a career.
Observatory located at the summit of Mt. Washington.
“I had no clue what I wanted to go into. I almost felt like a failure,” Hutton said. “Then I took a class that studied Earth circulations, and I found meteorology as sort of like a subset of that geography class. And there I kind of connected the passion and knowledge I was gaining with my love of winter weather, my love for clouds, my obsession with hurricanes.”
Hutton learned everything she could about monitoring the weather, including how to read models and write forecasts. She interned with NASA in the summer of 2023, then went on to complete her fall coursework early, opening up her spring schedule for an internship opportunity.
That’s when she found Mount Washington.
“I stumbled upon Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and I just shot out an application,” Hutton said. “How I got it? I really don’t know. I feel really lucky to have been chosen for this.”
“At the observatory, I do everything from forecasting, research, helping with the instruments… and we do a lot of shoveling.”
Patricia Hutton
Working on the summit of Mount Washington is no ordinary internship. For someone with less passion, it might be too much.
“The summit is 6,228 feet. Getting up there in the winter can take anywhere from an hour to seven hours, depending on conditions,” Hutton explained. “Once we’re up there, we are up there. Our shifts are one week on, one week off. So, we go up on Wednesday and back down the next Wednesday.”
In the observatory, Hutton lives, works, eats, and sleeps among a team of meteorologists who spend every other week year-round in some of the harshest conditions on Earth. On their off-weeks, another team does the same.
“At the observatory, I do everything from forecasting, research, helping with the instruments… and we do a lot of shoveling,” Hutton said. “The observatory itself is a good combination of research, forecasting, outreach, and teaching. It really does it all.”
Tricia Hutton forecasting the weather inside the observatory.
On a nice day on the summit, you might see brilliant sunshine, breathtaking sunrises and sunsets, or a full undercast, which is when the clouds sit just below the summit like a fluffy white ocean. But days like that aren’t what made the mountain famous.
“In 1934, the summit had a record wind speed of 231 miles per hour. And that’s when the building we have there now was not the same. It was like a shack. Our building is much safer now.”
Hutton explained that evidently, the observatory building might have blown to pieces if it weren’t for the large amounts of frost and ice covering the structure that greatly increased its durability.
“This completely solidified that I’m in the right place. I’m doing the right things and my path has gotten me to where I’m supposed to go.”
Patricia Hutton
“The anemometer — the instrument that collected that wind speed — still works and is still up there today. It holds the record for the highest wind speed recorded by man,” Hutton said. “Technically, like three decades later, a hurricane in Australia beat it on a buoy. But then the buoy broke. So, I like to think we still have the all-time record.”
In total, Hutton spent eight weeks from January to May living on the Mount Washington summit. That’s over 1,300 hours of extreme conditions and tight living quarters, taking hourly readings and conducting research at high altitudes. And after all of that, she only wants more.
“This completely solidified that I’m in the right place,” Hutton said. “I’m doing the right things and my path has gotten me to where I’m supposed to go. Every time I even step foot near the mountain, I’m so happy.”