You Can’t Climb Mt. Washington with Google Street View | Post 8 | New Hampshire

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Across the USA

7 min readDec 19, 2015

The Mount Washington Auto-Road is closed in winter. Alas, it is also closed to Google Street View travelers.

I’ve crossed into my second state on this westward virtual cross-country trip, and upon leaving Maine for New Hampshire I immediately entered White Mountain National Forest. A glance at the map suggested there might be a route to the Northeast’s highest peak (6,228 feet), but when I arrived at the signpost to the Auto-Road’s entrance (“Drive Yourself!”), no right turn was available. A command-` flip back to the Google Maps tab revealed Street View segments at Mount Washington’s summit — but indeed no Street View feature between there and New Hampshire Route 16 at the base. It is of course against the strictures of this project to “pick up the pen” and “fly” from one location to another. If you can’t get there from here, you can’t get there from here. I moved on.

Impenetrable glass walls at right turns represent one difference between Street View travel and pedaling or motoring through the White Mountains. But I find there are scarcely any others. One difference worth conceding, though, is abrupt date and weather change. For instance, as I clicked south along NH 16 beside the Peabody River my vantage point warped instantly from cool, early-color October 2015 to bright, melting-snow April 2011.

The quantum event was likely an artifact of Street View’s “time machine” feature, which allows travelers to call up archival images of any spot visited by Google’s cameras more than once. Google captured the Auto-Road’s entrance for the first time in October 2008 (almost 18 months after Street View’s initial release), again in April 2011, soon after in July 2011, and most recently in October 2015.

But, time travel aside, how different really is this journey from conventionally staring at America through a car window or dark biking sunglasses? As a Street View traveler I can moderate my pace and come to a stop and take in the view just as easily — perhaps more easily — than the motorist or cyclist. I can look up at the maples, down to an iron bridge spanning the river below, and around the town square — even while moving. I can take snapshots of mountain streams normally blurred by highway speeds.

Human interaction? Along a rural stretch of Livermore, Maine, I passed a beefy, bald, bare-but-hairy-chested man who appeared to be waving.

Was he waving to me? Or to his wife piloting the John Deere on a third pass around the field? He’s enjoying that spell of New England April when the spring sun is warm enough to go shirtless. So is his cat, stretching on the grass and the warmed pavement. The barn door is open — buckets, hoses, rakes. It’s time again for yard work. He’s wearing black pants and boots. He must have a motorcycle, but maybe he prefers driving that blue Mini Cooper. What about the basketball net? How many times has an airball or errant pass cleared the wall and found the sloped driveway, bounced twice, and then rolled out onto Sanders Road, perhaps causing a passerby like me to swerve or brake?

Sure, on a real world cross-country trip I could have stopped for a chat. Or maybe I would have met this man at a bar near my Livermore motel by pure chance. Our conversation might have answered some of my questions. But then, as always, there would be other questions, unanswered. Either way, tomorrow I can recall my encounter with this man, the field and basketball net and cat, and I can return to this photo weeks and months down the line when I’m in Nebraska. I move on, anyway.

The back door didn’t work either. My eastern approach denied, I sought the other motorized route to Mount Washington’s summit: The Cog Railway on the western slope. Open to tourists just three years after the Civil War (and seven after the completion of the Auto-Road), the three-mile railway has pushed over five million passengers to the Mount Washington summit in its nearly 150-year existence. Street View, however, does not do the climb, terminating at the base station.

The Cog Railway’s builder, local (but well traveled) man Sylvester Marsh designed the rack-and-pinion mechanics himself. The Mount Washington train was the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world, and the patented Marsh rack system is engineered to ensure two teeth on each cog wheel are engaged with the rack track at all times — the only two accidents in the railway’s history are attributed to an axle break and track switch error. Climbing grades as severe as 38.41 percent, the Cog Railway is surpassed only by the Pilatus Railway in Switzerland in terms of sheer steepness.

Tourism infrastructure atop Mount Washington actually predates both the Cog Railway and the Auto-Road. In the early 1850s, the Summit House hotel and its rival, the Tip-Top House, opened at the peak, establishing Mount Washington as one of the country’s first true tourist destinations. Fire destroyed Summit House in 1908, but the Tip-Top House remains as a small museum.

Mount Washington is well known for brutal and brutally-variable weather. Until a tropical cyclone off the coast of Australia bested it in 1996, Mount Washington was the site of the highest windspeed ever recorded — 231 miles per hour in 1934 — and some 150 people have died on its slopes, most due to weather or lack of preparations for.

It was Mount Washington’s foreboding nature — its dangerous weather and difficult ascent — that in fact inspired Sylvester Marsh to construct the Cog Railway. Yet the prospect of the project’s success was generally deemed so far-fetched that New Hampshire state legislators, when granting Marsh a charter, joked that he could also have a charter to the moon. Ironically, today, there’s a Google Street View for that.