Colorado Free Radio A few hours later, I saw why this place gets its reputation. Within minutes, the blue skies turned to grey and the winds kicked up. The highest wind ever recorded was here at Mount Washington - a staggering mph! The wind now is gusting at mph and I'm being tossed about - it's very difficult to stay up. The first thing you notice when the wind gets going is that it feels much colder. This effect is called the wind-chill factor. At winds of mph, minus five feels like minus . Wind and cold together multiply the deadly effects of winter. Which is why the Mount Washington Observatory is the best place to study the extremes of winter weather. That's if the instruments don't ice up! When wind and cold fog like this meet an object, something truly amazing happens. The surrounding fog is made of billions of water droplets. Strangely, they're all way below the freezing point but remain in liquid form called supercooled. When they hit an object, they freeze solid. These beautiful feathers of ice are called rime ice. Colorado Free Radio It's as tough as nails. This remarkable ability of water to remain a liquid way below zero is the cause of one of the most extraordinary weather events on the planet, an ice storm, and one of the worst ice storms in history hit eastern Canada with a vengeance. This was the most destructive, disruptive storm in Canadian history. We've a century and a half of weather keeping in Canada and there was nothing to match this. Ice storms are not unusual in Canada, coating the landscape with a beautiful shroud of ice. But in January , Canada was hit by a storm that was anything but usual. At first, the ice storm of ' was just as magical. It was really more of an exhilaration. People were not too disrupted by that. School was cancelled, businesses closed, but it was a winter wonderland, a wonderland where the landscape looks so beautiful. On the th January, winter was still on the attack. A bank of freezing polar air blanketed the north east, while a mass of warm, moist air from Texas moved in above the polar air, forming a wedge, trapping it beneath - perfect conditions for an ice storm. But in the middle of the wedge, rain from the warm air above doesn't have time to freeze solid on its way down, so it falls as supercooled rain. The raindrop will fall through the wedge of cold air and the liquid raindrop will begin to cool. Colorado Free Radio But it doesn't quite freeze. It freezes to the point of supercool which is below freezing point, but it is still liquid. Because the object it hits is below freezing, it's almost shocked, it makes the perfect transformation from the liquid to the solid, spreads out and freezes into a little veneer of ice - the toughest, most adhesive ice nature can produce. Ice storms can be lethal, but usually the misery only lasts a few hours. The ice storm of January was different - it arrived in waves. For two days, the freezing rain kept coming. The ice kept getting thicker and thicker, the wires got bigger. The trees were building up with ice. See the thickness of this ice compared to my handl You could have four inches of ice around a small twig. And that twig is part of a branch, also encased in ice.