Nonsense. Ever hear of mountain climbing?
Mountain climbing on anything much risker than Appalachian Trail SW of
New England and outside NC-VA appears to me to be voluntarily putting
life/limbs at risk.
Most Appalachian risks appear to me to be from weather. For one thing,
the greatest non-tornado wind ever measured by an instrument on land so
far was at the punitive weather station at the top of Mt. Washington, NH,
merely 6,288 feet above sea level!
(NC and VA have slightly higher Appalachian peaks, still bgelow 6700
feet above sea level.)
2/3 of days from November to April that mountaintop has winds exceeding
hurricane force according to the Wiki article on it!
Along with snowstorms all 12 months of the year!
A slogan that Mt. Washington has, actually questioned and called into
doubt somewhat successfully, is "world's worst weather". It appears to me
that ice storms and large hail and notable supercell thunderstorms and
tornadoes stronger than F2 probably run low there, and annual snowfall is
probably exceeded by that of someplace WSW of Mt. Washington somewhere in
NY state closer to lakes Erie and Ontario, but the weather still often
gets very bad at the top of Mt. Washington.
If you know the daily high temperature at the low end of the hiking
trail up that mountain, subtract probably 25 degrees F to get a
first-estimate temperature for the air at the mountaintop. Also consider
that "polar front jet stream" winds, normally centered 30,000-36,000 feet
above sea level, go quite wide from center of where they should be and
all-too-often in some spots exist as low as 850-millibar level - merely
around 1 mile above sea level!
As for 14,000 foot mountains in/near the Colorado Rockies and anything
similar - the weather at 6,000-6,500 feet is a lot milder than that at
the top of Mt Washinmgton NH.
The main problems are mountaintop-specific ones of cold temperature,
wind and windchill, and lightning.
One hazard of high mountaintops is lightning from cumulus clouds that
would be obviously short of being thunderstorms elsewhere.
Beware of "cumulus mediocris" that is usually a
smaller-semi-blowup-becoming-a-non-event "slightly threatening fair
weather cloud". Those can zap mountaintops with lightning. Not that they
usuallyv do such, but that is a risk in mountaintop areas.
Also beware that there is "cumulonimbus polaris" - cumulonimbus
(producing significant surface-reaching precipitation) of more
compact size forming where it is cold. Those produce lightning more and
more widespread than Cumulus Mediocris does, but I still expect both not
much and great discrimination towards mountaintops for lightning from
Cumulonimbus Polaris.
After that, mountain climbing is at least sometimes a very vigorous
activity with great burning of calories, and then your body "runs out of
gas", and 50 F (+10 C) recently was "T-shirt weather" but later became
outright chilly... let alone how a human body experiences 20's/10's F
(around -10 C) - which is "only a little cold for summertime" at the
14,000 foot level ("on the fourteen-ers") in Colorado.
Thankfully, I have only climbed Appalachians to about 1650-1700 feet
above sea level, on and close to the portion of the Appalachian Trail
around 20 miles (32 km) north of Reading PA, around 25-30 miles (40-48
km) west of Allentown PA, on and near "Hawk Mountain" - which is the
more-straight-eastward continuation of the "Blue Mountain" ridge (for very
few miles) from Blue Mountain's fork about 20 miles north of Reading PA.
In that general area, the Appalachian Trail tracks along Blue Mountain
through the "Blue-Hawk fork" (the Hawk Mountain sidetrack from the
Appalachian Trail there is known as the "Pinnacle Sidetrail".
It is officially unpermissible to ride a bicycle on the Appalachian
Trail.
And the main bike-able road up Mount Washington is a private toll road
only permitting bike riding on some specific October day wnen the weather
most of the way up is like that of November in Buffalo NY, sometimes as
bad as December in Buffalo NY in the upper 1/2 or 1/3 except for need to
double or maybe triple the wind that Buffalo NY endures in windier times
for that bike-race-"of-time-trial-style" put-up-with by that private toll
road on that merely 6,288 foot-above-sea-level mountain.
- Don Klipstein (
[email protected])
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