The byway even leads to the grand old Mount Washington Hotel and the coal-fired Cog Railway locomotive that belches black smoke as it chugs up the mountain. From many vantage points, Washington's broad 6,288-foot summit slumbers on the far horizon. On clear winter days, the color of the mountain snow intensifies to the chalk white of Herman Melville's infamous whale, Moby Dick. On warm, hazy afternoons, the mountain becomes faint and mysterious, assuming a beauty found in landscape scenes from ancient Japan. Most years, snow crowns the summit in late September and lasts until May or June.
Weather changes in a flash.
In late winter, skies above the Mount Washington Valley turned, in 72 hours, from cobalt blue, to hazy white, to battleship gray and then coal black. At dusk, wind-driven clouds spun off nearby hills. Sunlight, adding the drama of a Renaissance painting, beamed through a pastel-blue hole in the overcast. Edges of gray clouds turned sulphur yellow and soft pink, the color of the inside of a conch shell. It takes about two and a half hours to cross Vermont.