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2010-04-30 10:00:10.000 – Drew Hill,  Summit Intern

Blowing Snow

The ”good weather” moniker was funny for the first 5 months, but honestly, it’s starting to get old. Don’t get me wrong, the sunny skies, record highs, and apple … fritters have been wonderful. I’ve carved many a turn in the fine spring cornsnow, and my skin’s still reeling from that day I callowly renounced sunscreen for the extra 12 ounces of weight it would add to my pack back in early April.

I digress. A week from Saturday will mark the end of my internship on the summit (I know, I know; my heart pangs with grief). I will wistfully pack up my pocket protector and graphing calculator and head south to start my post-graduate work. Unfortunately, I can’t see myself being able to concentrate on my studies. Instead, I’ll likely spend my days sulking in the shallow end of my downtown luxury duplex’s rooftop pool (read: the not-walk-in closet of the cheapest 1-br sublet I could find on Craigslist). Why? Because I have failed to accomplish my one and only pre-internship goal: experience a 100+ mph wind. That’s right; in the 5 months that I have spent at the home of the World’s Worst Weather, an event that occurs, on average, one in every four days during the winter has completely escaped me!

In other news, these past couple of days have been pretty solid weather-wise. The 2-ish feet of snow that pounded us this week in combination with the 70-95 mph winds (I know, SO CLOSE!) we’ve been seeing have turned the Presidential Range into something out of a Trevanian novel (see: the brilliant mountaineering-based spy novel “The Eiger Sanction”)! Snow seems to be blowing hundreds off feet from the summits, and looking up at Adams from the Auto-Road, you’d swear you were at the base of Everest’s Southeast Ridge.

Well, it’s about high time I went for a hike–the howling banshees of Mt. Washington’s famed winds beckon.

Drew Hill,  Summit Intern