Marty passed away a few days ago. He went quietly. It happened in the vet’s office. There was no suffering, no pain, he purred until the end. Rebecca Scholand was holding him during his final moments. Hers was the last face he saw.
“Marty was a good cat,” Rebecca says. “He was king of the mountain. That’s what we called him.”
Marty’s mountain happens to be Mount Washington, in New Hampshire. The highest peak northeast of the Mississippi. Marty lived out his entire 12 years at a weather observatory, perched on the summit of the most topographically prominent feature in the Northeastern United States.
This is not your everyday mountain. Mountain Washington stands surrounded by the 750,000-acre White Mountain National Forest. On a clear day, views from the summit extend into Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Quebec, and the Atlantic.
The world looks different at 6,228.8 feet. Very, VERY different. In fact, it doesn’t even look like Earth. Sometimes it looks more like a cross between the North Pole and rear end of the moon.
“Marty loved it here,” says Rebecca.
Rebecca is Summit Operations Manager for the observatory, and she’s been working alongside Marty for a decade. She remembers when he was just a little kitty.
“I lived at the observatory on rotation for four years. And when I first got there, I’ll admit, I wasn’t a domestic cat person. We had barn cats growing up, that’s not the same thing. But Marty changed all that. We became friends, and Marty made that place feel like a home.”
It’s hard to fathom how anyone could feel homey on top Mount Washington. This mountain is where the world’s worst weather occurs—which is not a figure of speech but a meteorological fact.
It was here where the oldest record for the nation’s coldest temperature was set in 1885, when the thermometer dropped to a whopping 50 below.
The mountain also holds…