FILM : A Dangerous Peek

Los Angeles is a city filled with transplants from New England eager to escape the bitter winters, but often loathe to break their ties with home.

Such nostalgia was behind the making of an hourlong documentary about New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington, produced this year by a former New Englander who has lived in Mar Vista for the past seven years. New England transplants--and others from cold-weather areas--who wish to reminisce about the picturesque winters without suffering from chilled cheeks and frozen toes, can turn to David Wittkower’s film, “Mt. Washington: The Second Greatest Show On Earth,” which explores the severe weather conditions that can change Mt. Washington’s peak from beauty to beast.

“I used to climb that mountain with my family when I was growing up, and I always thought the stories about its weather were interesting,” said Wittkower, 34, a Rockport, Mass., native who traveled back and forth between Mar Vista and New Hampshire during the making of the film. “When I mention it to people out here they all know the mountain and they say things like, ‘Hey, I used to spend summers there and I didn’t know anything about the (harsh winter) weather.’ ”

Three hours outside Boston, the slopes of 6,288-foot Mt. Washington are dotted with hikers during mild months and skiers in the winter. Yet, the pastoral beauty of the mountain’s first 4,500 feet, protected by a thicket of trees that rings the mountain, belies the harsh conditions that exist on the stark, bare summit that is a 2 1/2-mile hike to the top.

“Because the mountain is not very high, people think they can make it to the top, but the trees end at 4,500 feet and there is no protection after that,” Wittkower said.

At the top of the mountain, record-breaking winds have hit 231 m.p.h. With the wind chill factor, temperatures often drop lower than 100 degrees below zero.

“It’s like someone hit you with a baseball bat--you can’t breathe,” Wittkower said.

Worse, the weather can shift in an instant--from sunny and calm one minute, to dark and stormy the next. In recorded weather history, the mercury has never climbed higher than 72 degrees at the top of the mountain, and snow, at an annual average of 255 inches, has fallen there during every month of the year.

Such dramatic weather conditions are the focus of Wittkower’s $33,000 film. It has been aired by some Public Broadcasting System stations and it is being sold at the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Me.

Location and altitude form a deadly combination at Mt. Washington. The summit lies in the path of three major storm tracks on the east coast: one from the Eastern seaboard, another from the Ohio Valley and the third from the Great Lakes. “The (wind and temperature) conditions are about equal to what a plane would experience at 30,000 feet,” Wittkower said.

Many of the people who have scorned the weather warnings have not lived to tell about their challenge on Mt. Washington. Listed on a plaque inside the observatory are the names of 108 people who have died since the late 1800s in weather-related accidents on the mountain. Five people have died there this year alone.

Unfazed by the statistics, Wittkower and a crew of up to three dressed in survival suits and filmed on the mountain for a total of nearly two weeks--one trip in the fall and another in the winter--in 1991 and 1992. During their stays, the crew bunked in with the staff at the observatory.

“They have all the comforts of home,” Wittkower said.

But there was little comfort outside, particularly in the winter, when Wittkower said he could only film outside for up to 15 minutes at a time.

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“We had to keep running inside and outside--we didn’t want the film to freeze and break,” he said. “And every part of our body had to be covered, otherwise it would be frostbitten in about a minute.”

Ice was another concern, Wittkower said. “There are spots that, if you slip, you’d fall 1,600 feet,” he said.

And there was the unpredictable weather. On one occasion, the crew was filming the remains of a plane that had crashed into the mountain when a black cloud engulfed the mountain top and the temperatures plummeted.

“We walked about 50 feet--it took just a minute or two--and we were completely whited out. We couldn’t see a thing,” he said. “My first thought was, ‘Isn’t this weird--we’re going to die on a mountain while we’re making a film about the mountain.’ ”

But in five minutes, the clouds were gone, Wittkower said.

Wittkower’s story is typical of those that meteorologists and others who work at Mt. Washington’s weather observatory hear repeatedly.

“People who overestimate their ability and underestimate the weather situation usually end up in some kind of trouble and we have to rescue them,” said Kenneth Rancourt, associate director for research at the weather observatory. “The death toll only represents a fraction of what happens to people up here. Many people have had frostbite bad enough to lose their ears, noses, fingers and toes.”

The stories of personal triumph over Mt. Washington, which fuel Wittkower’s documentary, still leave the filmmaker in awe.

“It is such a great place,” he said.