![Cog RW Tour Guide [pdf file]](images/tour_guide_pdf.png)
New Summer of 2010: Each locomotive now features an onboard Audio Tour narrated by Fritz Weatherbee.
This is an excerpt (unabridged) from the new Onboard Historic Audio Tour on The Cog:
"...On our left we pass the memorial to Lizzie Bourne, a young woman from Maine, who accompanied her uncle George Bourne and his daughter, Lucy, on a climb up the eastern side of the mountain. It was September 14, 1855, a day that started with rain, but cleared enough so that they decided to hike to the Summit House, which was located where the Sherman Adams Summit Building stands today. Two miles below the summit, the rain resumed and dusk fell. Visibility diminished.
Lizzie, at age 23, had a weak heart. She was also burdened by garments like petticoats, a heavy skirt and pantaloons - what one historian estimates as 45 yards of fabric. As her clothes were soaked, their weight became intolerable and the cold permeated them. The trio stumbled in darkness with little notion of their progress. When the icy wind became intolerable, George urged the women to lie down and he built a crude stone wall to shelter them from the wind. The three then curled up together to share their body heat and await daybreak. At around ten o'clock, George felt Lucy's hand and forehead. They were cold and lifeless. Wracked with despair and grief, he clung to twenty-three year-old Lucy for the next eight hours.
To George Bourne, daybreak brought further heartbreak. Gazing upwards, he saw the summit house only 100 yards distant. The little group had passed over the summit and fallen exhausted on the mountain's west side.
Lizzie's funeral was scheduled for September 18, but had to be postponed because of heavy rains. Her uncle George, a robust man in his fifties, was broken by that night on the mountain. His family saw his resistance to sickness fade away. He died of typhoid fever in December 1856, less than fifteen months after his beautiful niece had breathed her last,
Now, Lizzie was not the first recorded fatality on Mount Washington - nor would she be the last. Beginning in 1849, with the death of an Englishman, aged 20, named Richard Strickland (like Lizzie, he succumbed to hypothermia), there are fairly accurate records of the lives claimed by Mount Washington. The death toll now exceeds 135...."
Ride The Mount Washington Cog Railway and hear more about these heros and the natural history of Mount Washington.