My First Week As An Intern 2009-08-31 14:28:28.000 - Will Tourtellot,  Summit Intern NULL With my first shift as and intern drawing to a close, I want to express how excited I am to be here! Fall and winter are rapidly approaching and I have never experienced a New England fall or an extreme Mount Washington winter. Settling in at the Observatory has been very easy, and our accommodations are much different than what I have been used to since March while working in the AMC's Hut system. It's sort of like living in the 'front-country,' on a mountain with

Voluntter and Anniversary Week 2009-08-29 16:45:39.000 - Sue Rose and Jeff Cohen,  Summit Volunteers Intern Hedda watching the sunset Observer Note: The following comment was written during my last shift and was meant to be posted last Wednesday, August 19. With everything going on that morning, I forgot to post it before leaving and did not realize it until coming back up this week. My apologies to our volunteer Sue Rose, who wrote this comment, as I know she put a lot of work into writing it and deciding which of her wonderful pictures she wanted to share. Enjoy! -BCJeff

Highs and lows 2009-08-27 16:49:05.000 - Ryan Knapp,  Staff Meteorologist 130 mile sunrise w/ upper atmosphere orange glow. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, my résumé of experienced weather is constantly in transition while working here. In the past, I probably would have used some sort of weather journal to track this, scratching out the old data and replacing it with the new. With how variable the weather is up here, that method would eventually make my entries look sloppy and full of black scratch outs. Thankfully the digital age has allowed me to type it

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE WEATHER, THE PEOPLE AND THIS PLACE 2009-08-26 17:50:24.000 - Jane Kellogg,  Summit Volunteer Rainbow As OBS volunteer this week, I'm sure my experience has been typical to that of many others when volunteering for the first time. You learn more about weather and the work of meteorologists. You gain a better understanding of the entire MWOBS organization and all they're doing as they maintain the summit traditions of weather recording and forcasting, while at the same time continue to expand their mission. You experience the alpine environment with its sublime, quiet moments; rapid weather changes; fury

Voted off the mountain 2009-08-25 17:34:25.000 - Scott Wehrwein,  Summit Intern NULL As detailed in this week's ObsCast, the summit staff on my shift has decided to vote me off the mountain. Although my departure was inevitable, I find myself wishing I didn't have to go. When I began to think about how to write my final comment, my first instinct was to go back and look at my photographs from throughout the summer. Thinking back on my anticipation for the photo oportunities on the summit, I decided that I'm pretty pleased with the results. Looking back at some of

First week 2009-08-24 17:27:56.000 - Mary Ellen Dunn,  Summit Intern The observatory building at night. My first week at the Observatory is almost through and I still can't believe I am here. Waking up on top of a 6,288 ft. mountain everyday is kind of surreal. The views of the Presidential Mountains, when not in the fog, are absolutely beautiful and the weather has already been pretty exciting, with a thunderstorm on Friday. Everyone here is great. They have been a lot of fun and have been helpful through the intern training process. Being the fall intern, I am anticipating

The Real Obs 2009-08-23 11:41:59.000 - Stacey Kawecki,  Observer and Meteorologist NULL Reality Television is the world's greatest oxymoron. The simple fact is, what we consider reality TV, isn't real at all. Now, I'm not trying to belittle the entertainment value of reality TV. I too have fallen victim to Iron Chef and American Idol. I'm merely pointing out that it is not, by any means, representative of real-life situations. It is representative of a producer who thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be fun to put a bunch of people who would never live together in a big house and see

Severe Wx! 2009-08-22 05:26:04.000 - Mike Carmon,  Staff Meteorologist NULL Yesterday was one of those days on the summit when I was reminded why I am in this profession in the first place. I was downstairs just waking up around 2:30 PM EST when Steve came down and told me that the radar was looking rather interesting. I hustled up into the weather room, still half asleep, to find everyone staring at either the computer screen or out the windows. Glancing at the radar, I quickly finished the waking-up process and became quite excited. The screen before me was littered

Tour of the new septic system and a run-in with The Presence 2009-08-21 09:42:22.000 - Scott Wehrwein,  Summit Intern Important Signage Anyone who's been to the summit during the winter months knows that the summit staff has to be rather careful about how much water is used. Although we have well access to as much clean water as we need, any water we use has to be stored in tanks because the leach fields for our summer septic system are frozen.This summer, however, construction has been happening on a new septic system designed to process our waste water year round

Final Days Comment 2009-08-18 18:09:21.000 - Alex Jacques,  Summit Intern One final good sunset. Well, all things come to end, and for me it's my internship here on the summit that will be concluding this Wednesday.In a nutshell, here is a list of things I have done while on the summit: removed cables, cleaned and replaced windows, the morning routine, learned how to take observations, museum training and work, tour shadowing, tours themselves, B16 entries recent and old, chopped concrete, filmed and created ObsCasts, wrote and recorded forecasts, cleaned the bottom of the Observatory Tower, took down and replaced instruments