Did a mountain in California just have a wind gust to 209 mph?

The National Weather Service reported, then retracted, a 209-mph wind gust in California, which would be a record.

UPDATE: Late in the day Monday, the NWS in Reno told AccuWeather that the gust warranted investigation, which could take months. More details are available in our story.

The National Weather Service in Reno, Nevada, initially reported a 209-mph gust from a weather station 9,100 feet in elevation at the Kirkwood Ski Resort Monday morning, but a neighboring office in Sacramento later shot that report down. Let's look at the data:

This graph shows data from all three stations mentioned, with the top one being the one in question.

The Kirkwood station itself is located above 9,100 feet, and these mountaintops sometimes do have extreme wind gusts. In February 2017, Ward Peak, California, set the state's wind record with a gust of 199 mph. It's a station on the west side of the resort at the top of the ski slopes, well exposed for winds from the southwest, but probably also from any direction.

The location of the "Kirkwood Six" weather station, according to MesoWest, on both 2D and 3D maps.

The wind data in the observations from Kirkwood looks reasonable, and I see none of the typical red flags (sudden gusts, or gusts that are more than twice the sustained wind readings).
Initially, I found a couple reasons that made me suspicious. For one thing, the station had just recorded a wind gust of 208 mph on Feb. 3, which did look odd because the sustained reading at the time was relatively low, and it would seem the chance of two record gusts a week apart would be slim.

However, two stations atop nearby Mammoth Mountain recorded wind gusts of 145 and 154 mph with these events, so who am I to say the 208 & 209 mph gusts weren't reasonable? What we could be seeing is a station that is oddly sited with some sort of a "wind-tunnel" effect caused by nearby peaks or manmade objects which are causing artificially high wind gusts that might render a record unverifiable, but that's just conjecture.

Ultimately, it's the responsibility of the World Meteorological Organization to verify the record, a process that can take years.