A New Route to the Summit: How Mount Washington Observatory Expanded Access with a ThingLink Virtual Experience

Kyla Ball June 9, 2026

The Background and the Challenge

Mount Washington Observatory (MWOBS) sits atop the highest peak in the northeastern United States — home to some of the world’s most extreme and unpredictable weather. Despite drawing around 400,000 visitors between May and October each year, the summit remains inaccessible to most people for much of the year due to severe weather, difficult terrain, prohibitive cost, and time constraints.

The Observatory recognised a dual challenge: increasing access to the site for audiences who could never visit in person, and improving safety and trip preparedness for those who could. Beyond physical access, delivering consistent, engaging educational content to K–12 students — many of whom have never experienced a mountain or extreme climate environment — required a scalable digital solution. Reconciling the voices of multiple stakeholders, including  Mount Washington State Park, White Mountain National Forest, the landowners of the Mt. Washington Auto Road, and the Mount Washington Cog Railway, into a coherent visitor experience added further complexity.

Solution: ThingLink

Working in partnership with students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the Observatory’s Director of Education, Brian Fitzgerald, led the creation of a fully interactive virtual tour of the summit using ThingLink. ThingLink was selected after consultation with experts from Stanford University and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), and was chosen for its intuitive interface and its ability to deliver a clean, uncluttered user experience without requiring a large in-house technical team.

The project’s creation ran over nine weeks: six weeks of research and planning with WPI students, followed by three weeks of on-site image and video capture. The result is a rich, multi-layered virtual experience hosted on the MWOBS website and promoted through email newsletters to their subscribers and via social media channels. The experience incorporates 360 imagery and video, as well as atmospheric audio recorded in situ, to authentically recreate a visit to the outdoor and interior spaces that can be explored at the summit.

Benefits & Results

The virtual experience:

• Dramatically expanded access to the summit experience for audiences who cannot visit due to weather, cost, or physical ability — overcoming the site’s seasonal and geographic limitations year-round.
• Established a unified voice for the mountain by bringing together five major stakeholder organisations into a single, coherent digital experience for the first time.
• Serves as both a pre-trip safety and planning resource and a post-visit follow-up tool, improving visitor preparedness for the mountain’s genuinely hazardous conditions.
• Supports K–12 science education by bringing extreme weather and high-altitude environments into classrooms across the country, regardless of geographical or financial considerations. For K-12 educators, it can extend and enrich the physical field trip experience and overall study topic by supporting both pre-visit and follow up activities. 
• Helps visitors orient themselves within the summit building, whose layout can be confusing for some, by way of an embedded map and floor plan navigation within the tour.
• The resource is also displayed on a 55-inch touchscreen installation at the cog railway museum, extending and encouraging in-person engagement, with VR headset showcasing planned for fundraising events and public outreach.
• A sustainable update plan has been established: a new cohort of WPI students will deliver content refreshes in late summer each year, ensuring the tour remains current without ongoing internal resource demands.

“The ThingLink platform caught my eye very quickly when our project team was envisioning what a virtual tour of Mount Washington’s summit could look like. The straightforward, accessible, and easily adaptable layout of the platform made producing the tour very quick work for our team, and we were encouraged right from the start that ThingLink’s customer projects work well across different environments like the outdoors, museum spaces, and beyond.”

Brian Fitzgerald, Director of Education at Mount Washington Observatory

This virtual tour demonstrates how ThingLink can help dissolve barriers that geography, weather, and cost would otherwise make permanent. MWOBS translated an otherwise remote and hard to access environment into an experience available to anyone, anywhere. The tour serves both educational and safety purposes simultaneously, and a sustainable annual refresh cycle means it will always be up to date. What began as a nine-week collaboration has become a living institutional asset — one that scales the Observatory’s mission of science, education, and public engagement.