We have been examining Bryson’s narrative about his travels along the Appalachian Trail as a metaphor for any long journey a person might take. Our discussions have taken specific moments from Bryson’s journey and extrapolated ways that we might apply them to our individual experiences, not matter how different. This small project will assess how well you have understood and can apply what we have learned so far. 

Mount Washington sometimes gets a little gusty, to put it mildly, and this was a particularly breezy day. In the previous twenty-four hours the wind speed had not fallen below 107 miles an hour, and often gusted much higher. When it came time for Pagliuca to         take the afternoon readings, the wind was so strong that he tied a rope around his waist and had two colleagues take hold of the other end. As it was, the men had difficulty just getting the weather station door open and needed all their strength to keep Pagliuca from becoming a kind of human kite. How he managed to reach his weather instruments and take readings is not known, nor are his words when he finally tumbled back in, though "Jeeeeeeeemf!" would seem an apt possibility.

What is certain is that Pagliuca had just experienced a surface wind speed of 231 miles an hour. Nothing approaching that velocity has ever been recorded elsewhere. In The Worst Weather on Earth: A History of the Mt. Washington Observatory, William Lowell Putnam dryly notes: "There may be worse weather, from time to time, at some forbidding place on Planet Earth, but it has yet to be reliably recorded." Among the Mount Washington weather station's many other records are: most weather instruments destroyed, most wind in twenty-four hours (nearly 3,100 miles of it), and lowest windchill (a combination of 100-mph winds and a temperature of --47°F, a severity unmatched even in Antarctica).