The highest peak of the White Mountains of New England is Mount Washington, 6,228 feet above sea level and one of seven summits in the range named after presidents of the United States.
The mountain has been a popular tourist attraction since as far back as the 1850s, and its appeal was enhanced in 1869 when one Sylvester March constructed the first cog railway in the world to carry tourists without effort to the summit.
In due course Mount Washington also acquired a weather observing station, one of the first in the United States.
This part of North America is renowned for the frequent severity of its weather. It lies in a zone where the cold continental air masses sweeping down from north-western Canada meet the mild southerly air flowing from the southern United States or the Atlantic.
The result is a perennial volatility, exacerbated in the case of Mount Washington itself by altitude.
As William Lowell Putnam, author of The Worst Weather on Earth: A History of the Mount Washington Observatory, put it: "There may be worse weather from time to time at some forbidding place on Planet Earth, but it has yet to be reliably recorded."
The observatory holds the world record for the lowest wind-chill temperature ever measured - a combination of a 100 m.p.h. wind and a temperature of less than - 40 Celsius, a severity unmatched even in Antarctica.
The wind on the summit blows at hurricane force, 75 m.p.h. or more, on two days out of every three in wintertime and on 40 per cent of days overall.
And not surprisingly, when these conditions are combined with the region's popularity with tourists, Mount Washington holds the record as the most lethal mountain in the United States: more than 130 people have lost their lives at or near its summit.
Mount Washington's most spectacular record, however, was established 67 years ago today, on April 12th, 1934. The weather observer that day was Salvatore Pagliuca, and in the previous 24 hours the wind had not once dropped below 100 m.p.h.
When the time came again to take the afternoon temperature readings, the wind was so strong that Salvatore tied a rope around his waist and had two colleagues serve as anchormen to prevent him being blown bodily away; even then, he was the nearest thing imaginable to a human kite.
Salvatore Pagliuca succeeded in reading the temperature, but no one since has bothered much with what it may have been.
Attention has focussed on the wind speed measured with the observation: it was 231 m.p.h., a clear world record, nothing approaching which has ever been recorded since.