A North Country man who spent most of the year being unremarkable, and then, for a stretch of
the 1950s, kept finding new ways to go up the same eight-and-a-bit miles of road.
Weagle came from Groveton and Stark, in the sparsely settled top of New Hampshire.
He worked ordinary jobs. He was, by the account of his niece Barbara Weagle, always
jolly, and not much got him down. Somewhere in there he decided that the Mount
Washington Auto Road was a thing you could keep solving differently, and set about
it with enough persistence that the newspapers gave him a name: Mr. Mount Washington.
Nobody has ever produced a satisfying answer to why. Dan Szczesny, who spent weeks in
Groveton and Stark tracking down Weagle's family and background for his book
The White Mountain, got closer than anyone, and still came away with the
impression that the motive may not be recoverable from this distance.
The previous version of this page gave his dates as 1911–1979. That was wrong.
See milepost 6.0.
Alton Weagle as a young man. Courtesy of Barbara Weagle, via Dan Szczesny, Appalachia 69:1 (2018).
Milepost 2.0 · the firsts
What he did to the road
The Auto Road's own history lists them plainly: by car, on foot, walking backward,
blindfolded, and finally the wheelbarrow. The press adds barefoot.
1950s
Walked the road backward.
The one everybody remembers second
attested
1950s
Walked it blindfolded.
Listed by the Auto Road and by the AP
attested
1950s
Ran it barefoot.
Conway Daily Sun; absent from the Auto Road's own list
attested
1950s
Climbed Mount Washington in every month of the year.
A single source, printed sixty years later
claimed
1950s
Raced the Cog Railway on foot and beat it.
Carried on this site for years without a source. Still looking.
claimed
The full register carries these with their sources attached,
alongside every ascent made in his name since 2011.
Milepost 4.0 · the sugar
A hundred pounds, never set down
This is the story that outlived him. Weagle pushed a wheelbarrow loaded with a
hundred-pound sack of sugar the whole length of the Auto Road, and did not put it down
once. Every retelling agrees on both halves: the weight, and the not stopping.
It is worth sitting with how strange a choice that is. Sugar is not heavy in a useful
way, it is heavy in a stupid way, and a wheelbarrow on a road that averages a twelve
percent grade is a machine for punishing your forearms. There is no record he was paid,
no charity attached, no bet named. He wanted to be the first person to have done it.
attestedAP, 2011 · Conway Daily Sun, 2014 and 2019 · Auto Road
Alton Weagle setting out on one of his record-breaking climbs. Courtesy of Barbara Weagle, via Dan Szczesny, Appalachia 69:1 (2018).
Milepost 5.0 · jacob's ladder
He got married on the mountain
In 1955 Weagle married Cora Carter aboard the Cog Railway at Jacob's Ladder, the trestle
where the track pitches toward its steepest grade.
It is the moment where the stunts stop reading as stunts. A man who kept inventing reasons
to be on the mountain arranged to be standing on it, at its most absurd angle, for the one
ceremony he only got to do once.
attested
The year is consistent across sources. The previous version of this page gave the date as
10 September 1955; that precision is not supported by anything located so far. If you have
the newspaper announcement, send it and this becomes documented.
Milepost 6.0 · 1984
Getting the date right
Weagle died in 1984, aged 73. The Associated Press reported it in its coverage of the
Auto Road's 150th anniversary in 2011, and quoted his niece Barbara Weagle, then 62 and
living in Groveton, on what he had been like. The Conway Daily Sun printed
“1911–1984” in 2014 and again in 2019. WhiteMountains.tv the same.
This site previously published 1979. There was no source for it. It is the kind of error
that propagates quietly through fan pages for decades, which is a reasonable argument for
grading everything.
The check
Three independent sources, one contemporaneous, one naming a living family member.
Weagle documented his own records. Asked whether they were ever verified, the family answer
was that he said he did. Which is the problem, and also the point.
In 2011 the Auto Road turned 150 and invited eight people to invent a first ascent of their
own. Since then well over a hundred firsts have been logged, and the field reached
forty-six in 2026. Almost none of it is athletically serious. A man delivered a pizza on
stilts. Somebody backed a van and trailer to the summit. Three people threw the first
forward pass on Mount Washington. A doctor pushed a giant rabbit named Alton up in a cart.
What Weagle actually left behind was a licence: the mountain is not only for people who are
fast. You are allowed to arrive at it sideways.
