By Darrell Halen
 

Ashley Moore’s recent trip to the top of Mt. Washington was more than a one-day winter adventure. It was an opportunity to increase her knowledge of science and to bring that information back to her Windham Center School students.

Moore, 33, joined several other teachers on an EduTrip – an overnight stay on the mountain’s summit. There, she learned about the workings of the Mt. Washington Observatory, toured the summit’s museum and learned some science experiments she can perform with her students.

“Now that I’ve had this experience, I can bring that piece into the classroom,” Moore said.

Moore is a fifth-grade teacher whose duties include teaching science to about 50 students – her own students and those in teacher Linda Satkwich’s class.

Moore traveled to the mountain’s top on Thursday, Jan. 17, and returned the following day.

During her first day, she had a 30-minute video conference with her science students from the observatory’s weather station room. The kids got a look at weather instruments and talked about weather conditions with her.

Moore also showed them how a bag of potato chips had gotten puffy due to a change in the air pressure.

Moore was scheduled to have a video conference with students gathered in the school cafeteria the following day, but plans were scrapped when Internet service went down in the Mt. Washington Valley.

Thursday’s video conference was not the first time that Moore’s students learned about Mt. Washington.

She had been talking with them about her trip, and a week before she left, Michelle Cruz, an outreach educator from the observatory, spoke to an assembly of students.

The observatory’s mission is to advance the understanding of the natural systems that create climate and weather.

Cruz told the students that Mt. Washington, the highest mountain in the Northeast, draws thousands of visitors, and folks at the observatory need to tell them what the weather will be like.

“We observe, measure and record the weather every single day,” Cruz said.

She showed them a picture of a snowcat that brings visitors up the mountain, a video demonstrating how fast wind travel at the summit and a recent listing of weather conditions.

Cruz also involved a couple of students in some demonstrations involving air, and showed videos of how boiling water thrown into the air on the mountain quickly turns into snow and ice crystals.

She donned heavy clothes to show how visitors should dress when they visit the mountain’s summit in the winter.

“Mrs. Moore will be geared up like this when she goes on her trip,” Cruz said.

The observatory is a private nonprofit scientific and educational institution. Cruz travels to schools in a “weather mobile,” provided by Suburu, the observatory’s outreach sponsor.

Moore became interested in taking an EduTrip to Mt. Washington while attending a conference for New Hampshire science teachers. And she was inspired to do a video conference by Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire woman who was supposed to be the first teacher in space when Moore, herself, was in fifth grade.

“I’m not necessarily a weather buff. I just like science and like to have some sort of an adventure and learn new things all the time,” Moore said the day before her trip. “I’m hoping I come back with some really cool experiments that I can conduct in the classroom that you don’t need an extensive science lab to do.”

She learned those experiments from Steven Roberts, a member of her trip’s group who is an eighth-grade Inter-Lakes Middle School teacher from Meredith.

Moore had been to Mt. Washington before – she joined a small group of hikers who made their trek during a nice late summer day about seven years ago.

“I thought it would be really cool to go up there during the winter time,” Moore said. “How many people can say they’ve been up to the summit of Mt. Washington in the middle of winter?”

Another person who thought Moore’s recent trip was “really cool” was Lauren Sullivan, 10, one of her students.

Lauren had recently seen the mountain while skiing with her father, Richard, at Gunstock.

“It’s amazing that she’s doing that,” Lauren said.

The combination of extreme cold, heavy snow, dense fog and high winds makes the 6,288-foot mountain, the convergence point of three storm tracks, “home of the world’s worst weather.”

In April 1934, a wind gust of 231 miles per hour was observed – a world record for a surface station. The lowest temperature recorded was 47 degrees below zero in January 1934.

Going up the mountain, Moore could see about 90 miles away. On Friday, the day of a snowstorm, she felt winds of about 50 mph at the observatory.

Moore has photos and video footage from her trip – images she’s excited to share with her students.

“My biggest thing with kids is that learning things and education doesn’t have to be boring. It can be exciting and you can do it different ways,” said Moore. “I’m hoping when they’re 33 they’ll say ‘I remember when I was in fifth grade and my teacher going up to Mt. Washington and that was the coolest thing, and I want to do something like that.’”