Mountain-Forecast: www.mountain-forecast.com
This invaluable website provides weather forecasts for more than 11,300 (and growing) major summits for climbers and mountaineers, with up to 5 different elevations per peak and updated hourly.
You can search by name of mountain, by range, by country, or by map. They go about six days out, and while you and I both know a lot can happen in six days weather-wise, it’s nice to be able to get an idea of coming trends, even if the specific forecast shifts day by day. You can expand the view of each day’s forecast to go from am/pm/night to every three hours, to hourly.
The forecast for each mountain gives the following, in your toggle-choice of metric or imperial:
- Temperature (high and low, with a separate column adjusted for wind chill)
- Wind speed (with a handy green, yellow, red rating system for at-a-glance checks or those new to the game that don’t know what 5 vs. 20 vs. 50 mph feels like)
- Precipitation (if there will be rain or snow, and if show many inches)
- The freezing level (aka the 0° isotherm, represents the altitude in which the temperature is at 0° — the freezing point of water — in a free atmosphere)
This is the one I pull up a couple weeks before a big climb and start my ritual of refreshing and obsessing. I have been known to check in while hiking to see if those dark clouds are still just the ones that were predicted or if the forecast had shifted to rain. I can’t recommend this site enough.
Wendy Harrington is a California native who has lived in a small town at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state since 2001. Her love of trail running and peakbagging has led her to summit all five Washington volcanoes, climb to the high points of three states, and put nearly a thousand miles a year on her boots. Her loves include ridgelines, saddles, granite, one-day pushes on big mountains, anything volcanic, long solo days, and objectives that push limits and test endurance.
