A bonus day at Blue Hill Observatory

Imagine this:

It is 21-degrees. The wind is blowing hard in this location that has recorded one of the highest wind speeds on record. The instruments, twirling so freely on the warm summer day this picture was taken, are now frozen and not moving. As a weather observer, you have the job of climbing this little metal ladder and working at least 60-feet above the ground to free the instruments of ice without damaging them!

Not my kind of job. But if I were a college student studying meteorology at UMass Lowell, I can not think of a better summer job than being a weather observer parked on top of the tallest of the Blue Hills in a little wilderness haven just 10 miles south of Boston. That’s Andrew’s job and we visited him and his colleague, Pat, on Thursday. It was a gorgeous day, and while it was a relentless, 500-foot hill climb (especially if you’re 62 and way out of shape) the walk up to the Observatory was beautiful. Met a towhee near the top who was especially friendly and gave us a prolonged lesson in towhee speak from just a few feet away.

But the object today wasn’t birds. It was to at last get acquainted with the Blue Hills of Massachusetts and particularly this famous old weather observatory – oldest, continuously operating weather observatory in the country! Because of the Hurricane Carol web site I had been fortunate to meet Charles Orloff, the executive director of Blue Hill Observatory, recently. He’s working on a Hurricane Carol book and when I told him Thursday we were heading up to the Blue Hills he was kind enough to call ahead and ask Andrew (sorry, I didn’t get his last name) to give us a tour. (For a brief slide show of our visit go here.)

We have been driving by the Blue Hills and the weather observatory for years, on our way into Boston on the Southeast Expressway, not knowing they were there – though the hill is obvious from the highway and sprinkled with radio towers. I had also seen the Blue Hills described in several hiking books, but then, I felt that anything run by the Metropolitan District Commission was too intimate with city life for me. I always choose different hikes. So it was the weather station, not the 7,000 acre park and Trailside Museum that drove us to Blue Hills on this day. As it turned out, most of what we saw of the park was from the wonderful, eagle-eye view of the weather station. It gives you a 360-degree clear horizon, being the highest point for many miles around.

The history of this place is wonderful, for it was founded in 1885 by Abbott Lawrence Rotch as a private scientific station for the study of weather.

I love stuff like this, for it recalls an era when real scientific research could still be a private, one-person affair – an era when two brothers could invent the airplane in their bicycle shop; an era when the first real personal computer could emerge from the brains of a couple of friends working in the family garage. Ooops…my romanticism is getting the best of me – that was a century later ;-)

In any event, from February 1, 1885 there is an unbroken record of climate observations at Blue Hill thanks to Mr. Rotch and a slew of others. Over the years a lot of meaningful scientific work has been conducted here, including a lot of early work with high altitude Eddy kites. During the 1938 Hurricane Blue Hill Observatory recorded a steady wind speed of 121 mph and a wind gust of 186 mph. Those speeds were recorded at an altitude of 681-feet according to David Ludlum’s “New England Weather Book,” one of my favorite resources. Considering how far inland from the hurricane’s landfall on the south coast of New England that Blue Hill is, that wind speed is a testimony to what a difference altitude makes. At the 600-foot elevation of Blue Hill there simply is nothing around to block the hurricane’s full punch (The highest wind gust ever recorded on Earth was on top Mount Washington in 1934 – 231 mph!)

Today the Observatory is a quiet, modest affair. The Weather Service still pays for observers there, but it is owned and operated by a private, non-profit organization and has carved out a role as a science center, frequently hosting school and other groups. They offer programs dealing with weather, kites, sky art and photography.

We were lucky to get a candid, first-hand tour of the Observatory from Andrew and Pat who showed us the room where several historical instruments are stored, then took us to their “office.” This is a small, circular room jammed with a combination of antiquated, somewhat-out-of-date, and modern instrumentation.

From there you can go up a flight of stairs to the roof and a terrific, 360-degree panorama of the surrounding countryside. On a good day they can see Mt. Wachusett off to the west where we go to watch for hawks in the fall. Today it was a bit hazy – I would put visibility at about 15 miles, since we could see the main buildings of Boston, but not clearly. If I worked here I would be tempted to park myself on the roof and not come down.

The two panels that caught my eye immediately in the observer’s room on the second floor were one that held a mercury-tube barometer dating from the19th century and another that contained a variety of electronic equipment with continuous print out of weather data from various instruments. What was especially interesting was not simply the contrast, spanning the era of modern weather forecasting, but the fact that the older instrument is the one against which the modern instruments are calibrated. There are some things you can’t really improve upon, and I guess one of them is Evangelista Torricelli’s concept for weighing the air using a tube filled with mercury.

After we finished the observatory, we went to a little enclosure outside that holds a variety of rain gauges and other weather instruments. Fascinating. You’ll find these pictured and described in the slide show.

So maybe some day we’ll go back and visit the Blue Hills. We did get some insight into them, wandering a little bit of the trails and taking a quick look at the Trailside Museum. My earlier impression – and concerns – seemed to be justified. It’s great to have 7,000-acres of greenery this close to the city – great for the people who live in the city, but maybe not so great for the greenery.

I guess I should be careful what I say since I explored so little. But I felt there was just too much litter around. The Trailside Museum had a little zoo of local creatures, but it felt like something that might have been real cool in 1950, but now was tired and worn. I’m not a real big fan of zoos. Some modern ones are nicely handled, but it does’t thrill me to see a dull-eyed, kinda puffy, red fox timidly sulking about, avoiding the handler who is cleaning his cage. I get the same sort of uneasy feeling that I do when I get near a pet shop in the mall.

OK, I may be giving the Blue Hills a bum rap – I really didn’t give them much of a look - but just the horrendous sound of nearby traffic would send me looking for other places to hike – and there are plenty of others not that far away.

I do, however, recommend highly a trip to the Observatory. You’ll find a telephone number on their Web site. Call ahead to see if a tour can be arranged. I believe they give them on weekends for a small fee. Hiking up the trail from the Trailside Museum would be fun, expecially for kids, because it’s a lot of relatively easy scrambling over rocks. We came down that way. But there is also a road that goes to the top and we found this much smoother walking.

Information for individual and group tours can be found here: http://www.bluehill.org/programs.html

Posted by Greg Stone at July 19, 2003 03:32 PM