Managing IT atop Mount Washington

It may be starting to feel like spring where you are, but at the top of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, the highest point in the Northeastern U.S. and home to the self-proclaimed "World's Worst Weather," it just about always feels like winter.

Clinging to the summit of the 6,288-foot mountain is the Mount Washington Observatory, a nonprofit, membership-funded organization that conducts scientific and meteorological research and keeps a 24-hour record of the mountain's perilous weather conditions.

Mount Washington is located at the convergence of three main storm tracks. Consequently, it boasts a near constant combination of severe cold, fog and low visibility, loads of snow, rain and rime ice (frozen fog), and extraordinarily high winds. Hikers are just as apt to perish in June as they are in January. It is also the location that recorded the world's highest surface wind speed: a mind-boggling 231 miles per hour on April 12, 1934.

It is in this most inhospitable of environments that Steven Welsh hangs his IT hat. His official title is IT observer and shift leader, and typically he is one of three full-time observatory employees in the summit building on any given day. (The others are a meteorologist and an educational outreach specialist, who will sync up with schools, via videoconferencing.) These employees work for a week at the summit and then get a week off.

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