Mount Washington was first climbed in 1642, but there was little activity there until the middle of the 19th century when it was developed as one of the first intentional tourist destinations in the country with the construction of the Tip Top Hotel, which is still standing and recently renovated, and an auto road and the Mount Washington Cog Railway (1869) to the top.

Mount Washington literally has some of the worst weather in the world, as it holds the wind speed record at 231 mph (372 kph), recorded in 1934 and regular winter temperatures of 47 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (44 below Celsius). Buildings there are designed to withstand 300 mph (482 kph) winds. Many are chained directly to the mountain. In addition to a number of broadcast towers, the mountain is the site of a non-profit scientific observatory reporting the weather as well as other aspects of the sub-arctic climate of the mountain.

The mountain is a popular hiking and recreational area, including Tuckerman Ravine, famous for its Fourth of July skiing and its 45-degree slopes, and notorious for its avalanches. It is the only mountain east of the Mississippi that has avalanches. About 100 are recorded every year and since 1849 more than 130 people have died in slides.

Numerous hikers have been lost on the mountain due to the difficulty of judging the weather on the mountain from down below. Hikers on the Appalachian trail visit the summit while on their way to and from Mt. Katahdin

External Links

• Mount Washington web page
• Mount Washington weather station
• Mount Washington cog railway, the only railway in the world built entirely on trestles, 3.1 miles (5.2 km).

The scale was initially developed as the Sierra Club grading system in the 1930s to rate hikes and climbs in the Sierra Nevada range. Previously, hikes and climbs were described relative to others ("harder than X, but easier than Y"), but this made it difficult for those who hadn't done the other hikes or climbs to understand the comparison, so the numerical grading system was an attempt to codify this into a single scale.

Currently, according to the climbing textbook Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, the system divides all hikes and climbs into five classes:

• Class 1: Hiking.
• Class 2: Simple scrambling, with possible occasional use of the hands.
• Class 3: Scrambling, a rope can be carried but is usually not required.
• Class 4: Simple climbing, with exposure. A rope is often used. Natural protection can be easily found. Falls may well be fatal.
• Class 5: Technical free climbing. Climbing involves rope, belaying, and other protection hardware for safety.

Note that the exact definition of the classes is somewhat controversial [1].

The increasing technical difficulty of Class 5 climbs led to the same "relative grading" problem that had caused the initial development of the system, so that class was subdivided in the 1950s. Initially it was based on ten climbs in Taquitz, California, and ran from "The Trough" at 5.0, a relatively modest technical climb, to "The Open Book" at 5.9, considered at the time the most difficult unaided climb humanly possible. However, advances in techniques and equipment have since led to harder climbs being completed. The first such climb was given the rating 5.10; the second the rating 5.11. It was later determined that the 5.11 climb was much harder than 5.10, leaving many climbs of varying difficulty bunched up at 5.10. To solve this, the scale has been further subdivided above the 5.9 mark with a-d suffixes. It is now an open-ended scale, with 5.15a the hardest climb having been completed (as of October 2003).

Reference and Source