Authorities have suspended the search for a missing Canadian hiker whose car was found in a visitors center near Mount Washington. 
 
 Pinkham Notch hiker last seen Monday reported missing New Hampshire Fish & Game crews are searching for a man who was last seen Monday at Pinkham Notch. More 
 
 Authorities launched a search Thursday for 47-year-old Francois Carrier of Drummondville, Quebec. State conservation officers and volunteers spent Saturday searching in and around the visitors center for him. Rescue dogs found Carrier's back pack, which authorities believe he lost May 8 while hiking. 
 
 A witness contacted local police Saturday afternoon about a man he believes was Carrier. The witness says he saw him carrying a duffel bag earlier in the week. 
 
 Authorities say Carrier's family has arrived from Quebec and will continue searching for him. He's been added to the national database for missing persons. 
 
 The White Mountain range, including Mount Washington, is a popular hiking destination. ||||| A man stand's in front of Mount Washington. Photo: Mark Cushman 
 
 IndefinitelyWild IndefinitelyWild is a lifestyle column telling the story of adventure travel in the outdoors, the vehicles and gear that get us there, and the people we meet along the way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 
 
 Before sunrise, one Monday morning in February last year, Kate Matrosova’s husband dropped her off at a trailhead in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. An experienced and well-equipped outdoorswoman, Matrosova planned to complete the Presidential Traverse that day, a hike that would see her eventually summit Mount Washington, after completing several lesser peaks leading to it. She would never be seen alive again. 
 
 Last week, I hiked up the mountain with Steve Dupuis, a local mountain guide and search and rescue volunteer. He was one of the first to respond when Matrosova’s personal locator beacon went off. He and his team would eventually brave wind gusts of 140 mph, and wind chill as low as -100 degrees trying to reach her. During the rescue attempt, the measured temperature of -35 degrees on the mountain’s summit made it the second coldest place on earth, after the South Pole. 
 
 “God only knows why she didn’t turn back,” Dupuis lamented to us. A malfunctioning beacon indicated Maltrosova might have been in three different locations, and the team wasted valuable time by splitting up to search each. By the time they found her at the third, she’d died of exposure. 
 
 The day we hiked, the temperature at Mount Washington’s summit reached 56 degrees. No minus. The sky was blue, and there was no discernible wind. Nevertheless, before we set off, a state policeman gave us the description of a missing hiker. Forty-seven-year-old Francois Carrier of Quebec was last seen embarking on the hike wearing flip flops and a T-shirt. Several hours later, on the way down, we came across search and rescue workers walking a police line through the woods, looking for him. Yesterday, the search was called off. His car still sits in the parking lot at the Pinkham Notch trailhead. Temperatures on the mountain reached -20 degrees on Monday morning. 
 
 If Carrier is pronounced dead, he’ll take the mountain’s total above 150 kills, since records began in 1849. 
 
 Wind blows towards Mount Washington from the northwest. Here, you can see the natural funnel towards its peak created by surrounding mountains. Click to enlarge. Photo: Summit Terragraphics 
 
 Why does such a small mountain kill so many people? One reason is obviously the extreme weather. “Mount Washington sits at the intersection of several major stormtracks,” explains Weather Observer Tom Padham. He's stationed at the mountain’s summit, and gave us a tour of his weather station. The jet stream carries nearly every storm moving west-to-east, and southwest-to-northeast across the country, right over Mount Washington. There, they intersect with weather systems moving south-to-north, up the Atlantic coast. Just a few days after our visit, Padham recorded the following video: 
 
 The mountain also sits at the throat of a natural funnel. Land to the west of the mountains is mostly flat, creating few obstructions. As it blows in out of the northwest, that wind encounters lower mountains fanning out from Washington, channeling air directly to it. The mountain’s own topography also plays a role; its very steep western face compresses the wind caught in that funnel even further. “Air functions as a liquid,” explains Padham, “and as you compress a liquid, it must accelerate.” The highest wind speed ever directly observed by humans was on the summit. There, in 1934, two weather observers stood outside with an anemometer and measured wind speeds of 231 mph. The device stopped working at that speed, even as they felt it gust stronger. 
 
 An easy portion of Lion's Head Trail. Note the loose boulders, the steep drop off, and the cairns. Photo: Alex Kerney 
 
 Due to that extreme weather, trees stop growing in the White Mountains at about 4,400 feet. On Mount Washington’s eastern face, that leaves about a mile and a half of hiking, totally exposed, often in whiteout conditions, before you reach the summit. Regular cairns along the route attempt to steer hikers away from the thousand-foot precipice just a few dozen feet to the south. 
 
 Before that particular trail—Lion’s Head—reaches the treeline, it first climbs through several steep gorges, requiring hikers to scramble up boulders. If snow and ice are present, it can, and does fall as people pass through. A prominent sign at the trailhead warns of this danger, but it still manages to catch people unaware. 
 
 An official incident report from 1997 reads: “On January 5, the body of Alexandre Cassan—one of four members in a party attempting an ill-advised winter ascent of the 6,288-foot peak—was discovered by a U.S. Forest Service snow ranger about one hour after the 1420 avalanche near the Lion Head Trail on Mount Washington’s steep southeast slope. All but one hand of Cassan was buried in the snow.” 
 
 During the summer, when risk of avalanches and icefalls abates, danger to hikers persist. The trails themselves—including the popular Tuckerman Ravine Trail—are strewn with loose, basketball-size rocks. Practically the entire trail is one big tripping hazard, just waiting to twist an ankle, and, if that happens, you won’t be able to walk off the trail under your own power. The terrain only gets more fraught as you turn onto Lion’s Head and attempt to climb the peak’s steep southern approach. And that’s the easiest trail you can find to the summit. 
 
 The building this sign is bolted to is held down by heavy chains that pass over its roof. During the storm that produced these speeds, the weather observers report feeling it lift off its foundation. Photo: Mount Washington Observatory 
 
 Of course, hiking isn’t the only activity that takes place here. Tuckerman’s Ravine, just to the south of the peak, is a popular backcountry skiing bowl. Even in the middle of May, we could see people climbing up its 40-degree, crevasse-filled and rock-strewn face, just to get one last run of the season in. 
 
 Dupuis, our guide, was on hand for another ill-fated rescue attempt there in 2012. A man fell into a crevasse, the weather turned, rescuers were unable to reach him that night, and he froze to death as temperatures fell. It was days before they were able to recover his body. Not everyone enjoys the balmy weather we had last week. 
 
 I asked Padham, the weather observer, how often the mountain sees blue skies. “Maybe 10 days a year,” he responded. 
 
 Even on this clear, calm day, with the forecast calling for it to remain the same overnight, Dupuis insisted we carry rain shells, base layers, down jackets, insulated gloves, a warm hat, and bring extra food and water. To avoid the ankle twisters, he also insisted on over-the-ankle boots. And, even in mid-may, much of the 4.2-mile hike remains covered in ice and snow. Microspikes were another essential he insisted we carry. I didn’t use mine, but there were probably a couple of places I should have. 
 
 Dupuis takes the risks the mountain offers seriously. Hiking much faster than the rest of the group, I found myself in need of a bathroom break. The kind that involves a trowel and baby wipes. When I suggested to Dupuis that he carry on with the group, and that I’d catch up in no time, he insisted they all wait while I walked out of site for a few minutes. Many jokes were had at my expense after. 
 
 His safety-first approach is in contrast to that of most other people we observed that day. A father and daughter hiked up after us, and arrived on the summit as we were enjoying a lunch of dehydrated backpacking food from Good To-Go. “Where can we buy lunch?” The father asked a weather observer. He hadn’t brought any water either, and spent several minutes drinking from a tap at the weather station. He and his daughter were wearing jeans and t-shirts, he had a Harvard sweater tied around his waist. 
 
 As we were departing, the father asked Dupuis if there were any faster routes down the mountain. His dismissive response? “Not in those shoes.” They were wearing slick-soled tennis shoes and I passed them a few minutes later scooting down a particularly slippery portion of the trail on their butts. Dupuis has had to put his own life at risk too many times rescuing the unprepared to be nice to them. 
 
 And that’s the real reason Mount Washington kills. Close enough to the northeast urban conurbation that a summit can be had in a day trip from Boston, or an overnight from New York, the mountain offers some of the best, and most easily-accessible hiking and skiing in the region. 250,000 people are said to visit each year. Doing that is as easy as pulling into the parking lot, and hitting the trailhead. There’s warning signs, there’s stories, and there’s even guides you can hire, but most people are content just to head out for a walk, and see what happens; ignorant of the weather, the terrain, and the dangers. It’s tempting to say that the government should step in, and require permits, or better patrol the trails, but it’s also easy to conclude that if someone is going to set out on a mountain notorious for its death-rate and extreme weather in flip flops, that they’d find a way to die elsewhere if this hike wasn’t available. 
 
 Even the experienced are prone to underestimating the mountain’s risks. Dupuis says Matrosova’s gear was good, “But she didn’t have any cushion.” As the weather turned, which here it’s prone to do, she didn’t have a shelter, she didn’t have extra insulation, she didn’t have a hiking buddy. With any of those things, much less all three, Dupuis says they probably could have reached her in time. On Washington, it’s lack of preparation, not the mountain, that kills. ||||| WATCH: 109-MPH Winds On Mount Washington Lift Man Off His Feet 
 
 Mount Washington Observatory/ YouTube 
 
 Though it's mid-May, warmer, milder weather has yet to make its way up to the 6,288-foot peak of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, as a pair of weather observers can attest. 
 
 Mike Dorfman and Tom Padham braved the 109-mph gusts at the top of a tower at the Mount Washington Observatory to record the hourly weather conditions. Dorfman wrote about the experience in a blog post and posted a video to go along with it. 
 
 This is how Dorfman described the experience: 
 
 "The Sherman Adams building has 3 foot thick concrete walls and 3 layers of bullet-resistant glass windows. Even with this protection, the constant, dull roar of the wind is ever-present in the Observatory's Weather Room. Heading up to the tower to deice every hour is an adventure; the enclosed parapet-like tower roars like the sound of a jet engine as a plane is taking off, and exiting the top door of the parapet is like opening up the window of that ascending jet." 
 
 In the video posted Monday, the weather observer fights to stay upright as the winds buffet him atop the snowy mountain. At one point, he launches himself into the howling wind and is briefly airborne before tumbling to the ground and sliding across the icy ground. 
 
 The powerful winds are something to behold, but they're nothing compared with the record 231-mph winds recorded on the mountain in 1934. 
 
 Known for its extreme weather, the observatory says "winter is Mount Washington's most alluring season," when "the peak's extreme conditions rival those of Mount Everest and the Polar regions." ||||| As she climbed out of the car 90 minutes before sunrise, Kate Matrosova could not have seen the top of Mount Washington, 5,000 feet above in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. It was 5 a.m., still dark and already overcast on the Sunday before Presidents’ Day. 
 
 The forecast was frightening, but it did not dissuade her: Matrosova was headed for the summit. 
 
 Up there, it was minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit — cold by the standards of those who live at sea level, but mild by the measure of the mountain in winter. The wind at the top blew steady, around 40 miles an hour. But in a place that boasts of the worst weather on earth, that’s not uncommon — or even severe. 
 
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 Did the wind whip hard in the Appalachia parking lot on Route 2 in Randolph, N.H., where Matrosova’s husband dropped her off? 
 
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 If it did, it did not dissuade her. Layered in down and Gore-tex, armed with goggles to shield her face and heavy-duty crampons to affix to her high-tech boots, Matrosova had planned to hike up the mountain range from the north and down the other side. 
 
 One by one, she would climb to the top of four mountains named for men whose memories the holiday also honors: Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Washington. 
 
 Facebook Kate Matrosova. 
 
 Bad weather was on the way. But while forecasts warned of blizzards in New Hampshire, the winds in the mountains were not predicted to be at their worst until later Sunday. Matrosova planned to hike down the south side of the range, past the Lakes of the Clouds, along the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail and out to the Mount Washington Cog Railway by 6 p.m. 
 
 Her husband, Charlie Farhoodi, would be waiting. 
 
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 In the parking lot, she scaled the nearly 6-foot-tall snowbank left by plows. Across a snowmobile raceway and a few paces up the narrow trailhead, a sign warns hikers bluntly of the risk they are about to bear: 
 
 Try this trail only if you are in top physical condition, well clothed and carrying extra clothing and food. Many have died above timberline from exposure. Turn back at the first sign of bad weather. 
 
 Matrosova, 32, was fit and strong and smart. A trader at BNP Paribas on Wall Street, she was also driven and determined. She had undertaken some strenuous climbs before, and this was the vacation she had planned. 
 
 And if Matrosova saw the sign by the light of her headlamp in the pre-dawn darkness — if she read every word before she set out between the trees — it did not dissuade her, either. 
 
 Trouble in the mountains 
 
 The call came over the radio in Sergeant Mark Ober’s cruiser around 3:30 p.m. Sunday, and within moments he knew the day had turned dire. 
 
 A hiker was in trouble in the mountains, a State Police dispatcher told Ober, a conservation officer for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. From the radio call, he learned Matrosova’s name and her vital statistics. He now had her husband’s name and cellphone number, too. 
 
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 Most importantly, he knew her location. Matrosova had pushed the button on a personal locator beacon. That triggered an instantaneous alert at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Fla., where emergency satellite signals from all such devices are monitored. 
 
 Operators in Florida immediately called the phone numbers associated with the beacon’s registration: The first, to Matrosova’s cellphone, had bounced to voicemail. Farhoodi, waiting in his hotel room in Gorham, got the second call and dialed 911. 
 
 So, just minutes after Matrosova pushed the button on her device, the details of her distress had reached Ober. 
 
 He plugged the GPS coordinates the dispatcher had given him into the laptop in his cruiser, and saw the location: south of the ridge between Mount Adams and Mount Madison, far above the tree line and the protection from the wind it affords. 
 
 Up there, the tree line is often the boundary between life and death. 
 
 Next, he checked the weather at the Mount Washington Observatory. 
 
 Between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., the temperature at the summit was 21 degrees below zero. The wind was blowing 77 miles per hour, and the wind chill was -67. In that wind and cold, frostbite develops on exposed skin in minutes. And it was only going to get colder. 
 
 Ober knew this could be deadly. In conditions that dangerous, rescues are not always attempted. Risking the lives of dozens of rescuers to save one person does not always make sense — a week or two earlier, the conditions had been so hazardous, Fish and Game Lieutenant Wayne Saunders said, that a party could not be sent to save a woman who collapsed. The people she was with loaded her into a sleeping bag and dragged her back to safety. 
 
 But Matrosova had no one with her. 
 
 Ober called his Fish and Game colonel and described the situation and the conditions — the decision to send a team in search of Matrosova belonged to the colonel. He decided they would attempt to save her. 
 
 And he called Farhoodi, a vice president at J.P. Morgan in New York. Farhoodi described Matrosova’s mountaineering experience — extensive, he said — as well as her determination and her itinerary. 
 
 In better conditions, her plan might have been doable, if ambitious within the time constraints. But weather is everything in the Whites. 
 
 Facebook Kate Matrosova and her husband Charlie Farhoodi. 
 
 “It gave me pause,” Ober said. “Nobody attempts that at this time of year, in those conditions. Certainly [not] alone.” 
 
 She had known the forecast, Ober said, but forged ahead. “This was her plan. She wanted to accomplish it. The weather didn’t seem to faze her that much.” 
 
 If she activated her emergency beacon, Farhoodi told Ober, it was because she was in real trouble. Ober told Farhoodi what the rescuers were up against. 
 
 And then Ober began raising the only people who might be able to save her life. 
 
 His first calls went to the conservation officers who are part of the Fish and Parks advanced search and rescue team — world-class climbers who perform daring rescues above the tree line. 
 
 Then he called Rick Wilcox, the president of the Mountain Rescue Service. If anybody could save Matrosova, it was Wilcox’s team. 
 
 “They’re the cream of the crop,” Ober said. “They’re the guys that will go up there and do stuff that normal people won’t, when it comes to saving a life.” 
 
 Assembling a rescue squad 
 
 Steve Larson’s phone rang a little after 5 p.m. On the line when he picked up at his home in Eaton Center, N.H., was a recorded alert marshalling the volunteer members of the Mountain Rescue Service. 
 
 The recording didn’t have much information, but it had enough. Larson began scrambling to get his gear together. 
 
 The call did not come as a shock to Larson, a soft-spoken, unassuming 58-year-old with a kind of wiry strength earned only from a life lived outdoors. “When you have a holiday week and bad weather, it’s almost a given that this is going to happen,” he said. 
 
 After gearing up, it took him 20 minutes to drive to North Conway to meet the three other rescuers who responded to the call. They gathered at Wilcox’s store, International Mountain Equipment, and went over their plan, distributed radios, and handed out other team equipment. 
 
 By then, a second location from the emergency beacon had bounced from the satellite to Florida — this one below the tree line, on the north side of the mountain. 
 
 The second beacon came as good news, Larson said. If Matrosova still had her wits about her, she would do anything to get to that line — it was her best chance of surviving. 
 
 Where the trees give way to open rocky terrain, there is no shelter from the punishing wind. By Monday morning, gusts would register at more than 140 miles per hour. Almost nothing can live up there in such conditions. 
 
 Below the tree line, though, the wind howls but does not bite nearly so hard. Someone with the right gear and a little luck could dig a shelter in the chest-deep snow and hunker down until morning. If Matrosova had made it down to the trees, as the second beacon location suggested, the chances that rescuers might reach her alive were surprisingly good. 
 
 So sometime around 7, not far behind a team of three conservation officers and with the temperature hovering around 30-below at the summit, the four men trudged up the Valley Way trail Matrosova had hiked 14 hours earlier. Another four-man Mountain Rescue Service team would follow later. 
 
 “My first thought was that it was really inappropriate for anybody to be up there,” said Max Lurie, 28, who responded to the second Mountain Rescue Service call and began his ascent around 10:30 Sunday night. 
 
 “It was cold — one of the coldest nights of the year — and the wind was howling,” Lurie said. “I don’t go up there when there are conditions like that.” 
 
 Larson could recall only a half-dozen times when it had been this bad. The Valley Way trail passed relatively quickly. It was cold, but with good gear and no wind, it was not unmanageable. And the trail was packed down from hikers traversing the same route. 
 
 But as they neared the location of Matrosova’s beacon reading, the hike turned into a crawl. 
 
 Off the packed trail, the men forced their way through snow that reached their chests despite their snowshoes, hacking their way through brush. In the cold darkness, their headlamps bobbed above the snow. 
 
 Larson’s spirits sank. 
 
 Even if Matrosova had fought her way back to the tree line, how could she have traversed this? It took some of the world’s best mountaineers two hours to travel a quarter-mile in this terrain. Why would she have abandoned the relatively easy trail to take this on? 
 
 “It just didn’t feel right to me,” Larson said. “She had no business being there.” 
 
 It was after midnight when they arrived at the coordinates the emergency beacon had described. It was 35 below zero. There was no sign of Matrosova. 
 
 By then, a third beacon reading had arrived — this one far to the south, on the other side of the peaks. Suddenly, what had seemed to be the calculated movements of someone fighting for her life now appeared to be the nonsensical output of a broken machine. 
 
 Exhausted, the team turned back. 
 
 At 3 a.m., they walked past the warning sign, across the snowmobile run, over the bank, and into the parking lot. 
 
 Paul Hayes for The Boston Globe Kate Matrosova began her trek on the Valley Way trail, intending to do a hike in the White Mountains in honor of President’s Day. 
 
 Scattered signs 
 
 By Monday morning, there were 11 readings from the beacon, some overlapping and others far afield. 
 
 But there were also more people ready to search. 
 
 A team from Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue, another area volunteer group, was dispatched to the original beacon location, near the Star Lake trail between Mount Madison and Mount Adams, south of the ridgeline between the peaks. 
 
 Mike Pelchat, a state parks employee who volunteers as a search and rescue worker, said he got a call to be on standby Sunday night. He put a pack together and was on the trail around 9 a.m. Monday. 
 
 Carrying 40-pound packs, the team hiked up the mountain. 
 
 “I’m an optimist,” said Pelchat, 60, who lives in Gorham in the shadow of the mountains. “Over more than 30-odd years, I’ve seen some amazing feats of survival. People can survive if they can get out of that wind.” 
 
 But by Monday morning, that wind was gusting upwards of 100 miles an hour. The Androscoggin Valley team members were being tossed from the trail like toddlers toppling on a playground. 
 
 They checked on each other often. In the savage wind, wearing gear that covered every inch of skin, that meant huddling close and shouting their loudest. 
 
 At the top of Valley Way trail, they huddled at Madison Spring Hut — a small shelter that was closed for the winter but substantial enough to briefly block the wind. 
 
 Up over the ridge, there was no such shelter. The blowing snow can eradicate any trail that might have existed. The frigid air and brutal wind on the ridge are what make these mountains a training ground for the world’s tallest peaks. 
 
 “A lot of people relish the severe weather,” Pelchat said. “That’s how they test and train themselves for the higher mountains around the world.” 
 
 But Sunday, he knew, had gotten colder and colder as the hours passed. The wind had driven harder and harder. What had been a mild Sunday morning gave way to hell: According to Weather Now, a website that tracks weather stations around the globe, there was a moment Monday morning when the peak of Mount Washington was the second-coldest measured place on earth, the Conway Daily Sun reported. 
 
 The first was a weather station at the South Pole. 
 
 “We thought it was going to be grim,” Pelchat said. “We were preparing ourselves for what we might find.” 
 
 It took nearly five hours to reach the location from which that first beacon — and three others since — had emanated. The team of 11 rescuers combed the coordinates and then doubled back, fanning out to search the area. 
 
 Around 2 p.m., a few hundred feet off the trail, Pelchat saw someone down on the ground. 
 
 Maybe one of the team had fallen over again, he thought. 
 
 But Kate Matrosova did not move, or stagger to her feet. 
 
 Her pack was off, and her face was scraped and cut. Her headlamp was still in place. 
 
 “It looked like she got blown off the Star Lake trail,” Pelchat said. “A big gust of wind picked her up and blew her off the trail.” 
 
 She died where the wind left her. 
 
 Matt Bowman/AVSAR An Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue team and Mountain Rescue Service team searched for Matrosova. Her body was found 22 1/2 hours after her distress call. 
 
 Retracing her steps 
 
 Along with the beacon that she hoped would save her life, Matrosova had brought another GPS device with her that day — one that guided her along snow-covered trails and tracked her progress. 
 
 So after rescuers bore Matrosova’s body down the frigid mountain to the hearse waiting in the parking lot below, conservation officers were able to piece together her path. 
 
 She first turned the device on when she emerged at the tree line, and she followed the Appalachian Trail directly to the top of Mount Madison, 5,367 feet above sea level. She followed the trail back down and stopped at the Madison Spring Hut to take a picture of herself, said Saunders, the fish and game lieutenant. 
 
 She looked strong and healthy. Already, though, she was behind the schedule she’d set. 
 
 With the fearsome wind at her back, she headed south along Star Lake Trail, following it to the summit of Mount Adams — 5,794 feet. 
 
 She surely knew by then that she would never complete the route she had planned: Her GPS tracker shows her turning back, retracing her steps along Star Lake Trail, headed for the hut and tree line below. 
 
 But if a tailwind pushed her up the mountain, a headwind held her there. By the early afternoon, gusts were already topping 100 miles per hour. Even along the south side of the mountain ridge, the full force of the wind was assaulting Matrosova. 
 
 Turning back was the right decision, but it came too late. 
 
 By 3:30 p.m., she was off the trail, in the lonely place where Mike Pelchat would find her body 22½ hours later. 
 
 Alone a treacherous mile above the world, she pushed the button on her locator beacon. 
 
 Paul Hayes for The Boston Globe Signs at the start of the trail warn potential hikers about the dangers and lack of shelter ahead. 
 
 Toeing a line 
 
 No one will ever know for certain how long she survived. Some take her headlamp as evidence that she held out at least until dark; others aren’t so sure. 
 
 Had she turned on her cellphone, Ober said, she might have been surprised to find that she could get through to 911. But she did not. 
 
 “It was negligent for her to be up there,” Lurie said. The conditions overnight were among the worst he’s seen, he said. 
 
 Though she was not a novice — people strand themselves on these mountains in rubber boots and jeans — the truest tests of skill out here are not physical. 
 
 “Her decision clearly speaks to her inexperience,” Lurie said. 
 
 But her route, Saunders said, “shows she was thinking the whole time.” She aborted her trek and tried to make it back to safety. 
 
 “She wasn’t wandering around the mountain,” Saunders said. 
 
 Finally dissuaded from her goal, she was trying, strategically and systematically, to save her own life. 
 
 “She was the victim of a combination of bad judgment and bad luck,” Larson said. But “people make worse errors in judgment all the time” and don’t lose their lives. 
 
 What haunts Larson is how close he came in his attempt to rescue her. 
 
 “One lesson in all this, for all of this whiz-bang technology, it obviously is not spot-on,” Larson said. If his group of rescuers had had only the one true set of coordinates of her location — had they not spent hours bushwhacking through chest-deep snow to a remote place she’d never been — they might have reached her 14 hours earlier than Pelchat did. 
 
 Maybe, he said, they would have found her: Frostbitten. Frigid. Alive. 
 
 But her beacon was rated for 20-below, Saunders said. The air was far colder. And mountain shadows, he said, can sometimes trick even modern technology. 
 
 “Maybe she relied a little too much on the technology,” Pelchat said. “Maybe she thought she could turn back. But the temperatures, and the wind, got the best of her.” 
 
 The weather was not the only thing that got the best of her, of course. 
 
 “When you’re goal-oriented, that makes you successful in the business world,” Pelchat said. “That also can put your blinders on.” 
 
 The single-minded determination that drives people to climb mountains in the first place is the same quality that can doom them. 
 
 And though the ridgeline between these mountains is narrow, it is not as narrow as the line between pushing too hard and not pushing hard enough. 
 
 Had she turned back sooner and made for the line where wind gives way to the woods, Kate Matrosova may have walked away from the mountain cold and disappointed and alive. 
 
 But she did not. 
 
 During winter in the Whites, the narrowest line is the one between life and death. 
 
 Paul Hayes for The Boston Globe 
 
 Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos
– "Why does such a small mountain kill so many people?" That's the question Wes Siler, writing for Outside Online, set out to answer. The mountain is 6,288-foot-tall Mt. Washington, part of New Hampshire's White Mountain range, and since records began in 1849, some 150 people have died there. In February 2015, Kate Matrosova became one of them. Faced with winds of up to 140mph and a temperature of 35-below at the summit, the 32-year-old seasoned outdoorswoman died of exposure before rescuers could reach her. (The Boston Globe wrote about the tragedy in depth.) "God only knows why she didn't turn back," one of those rescuers, Steve Dupuis, tells Siler. The pair hiked Mt. Washington recently, and before they hit the trail, a state cop told them about Canadian Francois Carrier, who hadn't been seen since starting up the mountain earlier this month in flip-flops and a T-shirt. The search for Carrier has been suspended, WMTW reports. The day after it was called off, Siler notes, the temperature on the mountain was 20-below—and that's one part of the answer to the question of why Mt. Washington is so deadly. “Mount Washington sits at the intersection of several major stormtracks,” a weather observer says, which creates extreme, unpredictable weather. On May 16, gusts on the mountain reached 109mph, per NPR. (See video here.) The record, set in 1934, was 231mph. In addition to the weather, Siler writes, Mt. Washington consists of tough terrain, and the danger of avalanches and icefalls looms. Noting that the mountain, treacherous as it is, is easily accessible to inexperienced hikers, Siler comes to the conclusion that, "on Washington, it's lack of preparation, not the mountain, that kills." (The remains of a climber lost 16 years have been found in Tibet.)