The hilltop that never took a day off.

Abbott Lawrence Rotch founded Blue Hill Observatory in 1885 with a simple conviction: climate can only be understood through an unbroken record. Observers climbed the hill through the Blizzard of 1978, through the post-9/11 lockdowns, through the isolation of COVID — because the record only has value if it has no gaps.

Today that record faces two threats at once. The daily cost of keeping observations running falls increasingly to our community as federal science funding contracts. And 141 years of handwritten logbooks — 51,000+ daily entries — have never been fully digitized. They exist on paper, on a hill, vulnerable to everything paper is vulnerable to.

“There is no backup. There is no substitute. This is the only place on earth with this data.”