Word: mounting
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...begin by taking the 6:15 a.m. train from Cuzco station, lumbering past the Mount Veronica glacier, small farming communities and colorfully attired Peruvian women selling their wares at the trackside. The disembarkation point comes 104 km down the line. There is no station there, merely an arrow indicating the way to the trailhead across the Urubamba River. Entrepreneurial locals sell $3 walking sticks carved from tree branches-and you'll need them, because you're in for a roughly six-hour rainforest trek...
That's about normal for this time of year at the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire's White Mountains. It isn't the tallest peak in the country. In fact, at just 6,288 ft., it isn't even the tallest in the eastern U.S. (Mount Mitchell in North Carolina beats it by several hundred feet). But the weather here is some of the worst in the world. Storms blow up without warning. Every so often a hiker caught unawares by plunging temperatures, fierce winds and snow squalls dies of hypothermia...
...precisely the experience members of this group were looking for. To get it, they had plunked down $459 each to ride a snow tractor to the summit and sleep in bunk beds for one of the two dozen or so overnight "Edu-Trips" sponsored each year by the Mount Washington Observatory, a nonprofit organization that's been running a weather station up here since 1932. (Independent hikers can ascend to the summit for free but won't be let indoors at the top unless it's a real emergency.) This weekend's theme was global climate change, with three talks...
...Mount Washington's horrific weather is pretty much an accident of geography. It just so happens that if you plot the tracks of storms as they move across the U.S. from west to east, they all converge, thanks to prevailing winds, on northern New England. The White Mountains, meanwhile, focus things further, turning already bad weather to flat-out hellish. The range stretches from southwest to northeast, pretty much at a right angle to winds sweeping down from Canada. As they run into the solid wall of peaks, the winds stream up and over the top, accelerating all the while...
...fighting, but would also be aimed at ending the Western economic siege of the Palestinian territories. But as if the hostility on the streets of Gaza was not enough to cloud the prospects for success of Tuesday's talks in Mecca, outside pressures on the summit have begun to mount...