Each May the 25-foot-high Cragway snowdrift – elevation 5,000 feet – is an obstacle to opening the Mt. Washington Auto Road.

The road’s crew must bulldoze and bucket load the drift to clear a path for passenger vehicles to drive the 7.6-mile road, which leads to the 6,288-foot summit.

Last Thursday, Nat Putnam, formerly of Bethel, was running the bucket loader.

He’s worked for the Auto Road for 25 years, most of them as a stage (tour van) driver. For the past few years, he’s worked on the road maintenance crew.

The crew’s schedule is as unpredictable as the mountain’s weather, he said.

Early last week the crew had made good headway in clearing the drift. But then snow that arrived Tuesday on the heels of rain and freezing rain buried the road section again.

“I was just trying to get rid of last Tuesday’s snow,” said Putnam on Sunday. “The hard work on the drift is done by the guy who runs the bulldozer.”

The road opened to the 4.5-mile point (just above tree line) Saturday, kicking off the 147th season.

Sunday should have been a day off for Putnam. But with road washouts triggered by more rain, he was out again that day.

Last year, he said, the crew had the road nearly cleared in mid-April. Then Mother Nature dropped four to five feet of snow.

“We had to start again from the bottom,’ Putnam said.

Another year, May brought 10 feet of snow.

Spring maintenance also includes power washing ice that’s built up in culverts on the upper part of the road and, later, replacing lost gravel with supplies stockpiled along the road.

In late May or early June, a light coat of new gravel is laid down along the mile stretch of road that isn’t paved.

When he started working there, only a couple of miles were paved, he said. A phased effort over the years to pave more of the road has made maintenance easier, Putnam said.

Once the tourists start driving their cars up the road or riding one of the stage vans, the crew settles into routine summer maintenance.

But that doesn’t mean the weather settles into anything routine.

“We get a little of everything, from thunderstorms with 120- to 130-mile-an-hour winds to midsummer snow and ice storms,” Putnam said.

When winds are predicted to be over hurricane force (75 mph), the road shuts down.

Putnam said the concern is not so much for vehicle safety as it is for people trying to get out of their cars at the summit.

In those conditions, the wind can pin a vehicle door open, he said. More commonly, a person can be blown over.

But high winds don’t necessarily prevent the road crew from driving up.

During 1985’s Hurricane Gloria, Putnam said, “a couple of us jumped in a van and drove up because we wanted to see what it was like in the middle of a hurricane. It wasn’t bad at all. It didn’t get over 100 miles an hour.”

He said such winds are not generally a threat to a van on the road. “As long as you’re careful, 100 miles an hour won’t (push the van off the road.) It also depends on the direction of the wind.”

Despite such seeming adventures, caution guides Putnam’s activities on the road.

“I don’t do anything that’s not safe,” he said.

Putnam also said the road generally has a good safety record.

“The road looks dangerous, but it’s probably safer than Route 16 or 2,” said Putnam. “People don’t drive real fast up here.”

He said most passenger-car accidents are minor and happen when drivers, overcompensating to stay away from the edge, slide off the inside of the road.

“Most people don’t know how wide their cars are,” he said.

Ironically, he said, drivers from the city often do better than rural drivers because they must be more aware of their vehicle’s dimension.

The auto road usually closes in late October, and Putnam returns to his winter job as marketing and events coordinator for Cannon Mountain ski area.

Putnam feels he’s lucky to have a “summer” job on Mt. Washington, at a location where conditions are ever-changing.

“You never know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next,” he said. “That’s what makes it fun.”