Mount Washington may get its first new summit hotel in over 100 years.
Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeastern U.S. at a modest 6288 feet, and is famous for its extreme weather. A windy day there in 1934 clocked the blow at 231 miles an hour, still the highest ever measured wind not in a tornado or cyclone.
If not for the weather, Mount Washington is an easily summit-able peak. Snow permitting, visitors can drive right up, and quite a few people have sought to inhabit the peak over the years. The first recorded structure built there was a house, built right on the summit by Ethan Allen Crawford in 1821 – and blown down by a storm only 5 years later.
In 1852, a stone hotel was built nearby, called the Summit House. It marked the beginning of Mount Washington’s development as a tourist property. A year later, the Tip-Top House joined it. Summit House burned in 1908 and was rebuilt in 1915, and it and Tip-Top are both still there, though they are no longer lodgings, instead renovate for historic exhibits.
In 1869, the Mount Washington Cog Railway was built, and brought tourists to the summit. It is still there, and still in use today. The owner of the railway, Wayne Presby, has his sights set on bringing back a little of that 19th century glory.
Presby is proposing a $14 million project which would permanently site 18 rail cars a few hundred feet below the peak. 9 of those cars would be sleepers, able to house up to 70 guests. As lodging, the rail cars would be low-impact and in keeping with the atmosphere of the mountain.
Several years ago, Presby proposed a different idea – a 35-room hotel among the other buildings near the summit. Environmentalists and hikers alike decried the idea, saying that construction would be damaging to the peak’s fragile alpine biome, and would be a blight on the historic view.
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