Blizzard-ready laptops, snow-penetrating radar, titanium ice screws - an all-new breed of technical climber is tackling Everest this spring.
In the 76 years since British alpinists George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared high on the slopes of Mount Everest - one of climbing's most famous tragedies - the elemental facts of the mountain have remained the same. It's tough to get to the top, tough to stay alive en route, and tough to communicate with the outside world while you're there.
The physical dangers of the mountain are immutable, but in recent years a flood of technological innovations has revolutionized the Everest experience. Much-improved climbing equipment and clothing materials have, for better or worse, made the peak accessible to talented amateurs. (They've also made the gear that Mallory lugged along - cotton rope, wool coats, hobnailed leather boots - seem shockingly primitive. See "Mallory's Manifest," page 244.)
An equally important upheaval has occurred in the communications realm. It was only a decade ago that the first satellite phones started showing up on the mountain. In 1990, Peter Hillary used a two-way radio to call down from the summit to base camp, where his signal was relayed via the sat phone to his dad, Sir Edmund Hillary, in New Zealand. Most of the country listened in on TV and radio as Peter announced that he'd summitted the mountain Sir Edmund was the first to conquer, with Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, back in 1953.
Peter Hillary's call opened the door to rapid change. Satellite phones have become standard equipment for any well-organized trip to Everest, as have laptop computers, digital video cameras, and (in some cases) ambitious network connections. During the tragic 1996 storm chronicled by Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, at least two correspondents were providing Internet dispatches from the mountain as eight people died over the course of a couple of days. Most amazing (and horrifying) was the call that dying mountain guide Rob Hall made from above 25,000 feet to his wife, Jan, in New Zealand, using much the same technology Peter Hillary used to reach his father. Not that long ago, if a climber died on Everest, the outside world found out weeks later. A report of Hall's death appeared inThe New York Times within 72 hours.
Four years later, Everest is becoming something of a multimedia hub. Numerous climbers - ranging from a Santa Fe schoolteacher named Kim Gattone, to a Bay Area-based group up there to haul garbage off the mountain, to a Sherpa attempting to break the Everest speed-climbing record - are all hoping to webcast from base camp even as you read this. Two major sites - MountainZone.com (www.mountainzone.com) and Quokka Sports (www.quokka.com) - have been making their living providing almost-live Web coverage of expeditions to the remote corners of the Earth. "Everest is our Super Bowl," says Todd Tibbetts, cofounder of MountainZone.com. "We average 10 million viewers a month throughout the year. Until Everest climbing season - then we get up to 5 million per day." Can The Everest Channel be far behind?
Making Media Junkies Out of Mountaineers
Now that everybody up there is either writing a book or sending email and digital-image dispatches back to loved ones and news organizations, we have learned the following: Running a laptop in the thin air above 17,500 feet is like driving a car low on oil. "You can actually hear the hard drives screaming," says Quokka producer Greg Thomas. That's because a hard drive's delicate parts require a cushion of air, and this cushion gets skimpy at high altitudes. Two seasons ago, an informal contest of mountain-ready laptops got under way; the combatants were Panasonic and Sony, each with their partisans. "You can drop the [Panasonic] Toughbooks from a second-story window and they'll still work," MountainZone's Tibbetts says with great admiration. But the old Toughbook was heavy: 8 pounds. Then Sony came out with the Vaio PCG-Z505, which worked much better at altitude and weighed in at 3.5 pounds. Round two: Panasonic came back with a new Toughbook (about $3,000) that weighs 3.8 competitive pounds. Sony countered with the Vaio C1 PictureBook (about $2,300) - at 2.2 pounds. The battle continues.
Sony appears to be the favorite, however, when it comes to digital video cameras. Currently, the workhorse is the Sony DCR-VX1000 Digital Handycam ($3,000). At first, it was used mostly by independent filmmakers because of its excellent picture quality. Then the hoi polloi started realizing that they too could manage the thing. The VX1000 works well on Everest for two reasons: A magnesium frame makes it very light, and it's not finicky. You do have to take care to keep it warm inside your coat, but it's essentially an aim-and-shoot camera, which is crucial at the brain-scrambling height of 20,000 feet. "Whenever the climbers don't have to think is when we get the best results," says MountainZone's Tibbetts.
As digital still cameras go, Kodak's DC265 ($899) is simplicity itself. An optical viewfinder lets you keep shooting long after the LCD display freezes up, and, most important, the DC265 runs on AA batteries. But at Quokka.com, producers recommend their correspondents carry Sony's DSR-PD100 digicam ($2,400) because it can double as a video and still camera. "A lot of Quokka.com's design involves multiframe still sequences," says Jonathan Chester, one of the site's producers. "We've found it's really hard to get good action shots with digital still cameras because of the time lag," the interval between the moment when you push the button and when the shutter clicks.
Instead, Chester often asks the climbers who film Quokka's Everest footage to shoot video with the PD100 and then, at the end of the day, edit frame grabs that are sent down the mountain, either by radio modem or on a Sony Memory Stick, a 64K storage medium about the size of a piece of Juicy Fruit. Memory Sticks are the PD100's great selling point - no more carting videocassettes to base camp. The camera does have one Everest liability: The liquid-crystal display in its 3.5-inch flip-open screen, very cool at sea level, tends to freeze solid above 17,000 feet, shorting out the camera. Inventive climbers have come up with a fix: They duct-tape the screen shut and slap a DO NOT OPEN sticker on it.
But what every correspondent is drooling over this year are satellite phones; in particular, they pine for Nera's M4 HSD ($11,000). Each Nera packs near-ISDN-speed bandwidth into a 9-pound briefcase-sized package.
The ideal satellite service for Everest was Iridium. Iridium-style satellite phones require no fixed antenna, and fit nicely in a parka pocket. Their reception actually improves the higher up the mountain they travel - the fewer obstructions between them and the satellites, the better. "The cool thing about Iridium," four-time Everest summiter Wally Berg said in late winter, "is that you can just phone dispatches in straight off the mountain without going through base camp." The not-so-cool thing about Iridium is that it went bankrupt, and in March decided to bring down its 66 satellites. The timing couldn't have been worse: Some of the expeditions carrying Iridium phones had already left for Nepal. With Iridium biting the dust, climbers will have to hope that some other sat-phone company - Globalstar is one emerging contender - will step up someday to provide worldwide service.
Motorola TalkAbout 250s ($99) make up the informal base camp telephone network. This tiny radio turns its weakness into an advantage: On Everest, you can't have base-camp chatter hogging the same airways that someone might need for really important radio calls. The TalkAbouts run on their own frequency, and have multiple privacy codes and channels built in.
The big brother to the 250 is the Motorola Distance DPS ($259). It's lightweight, with a 2-watt transmitter strong enough for communication all over the mountain. Dual-frequency settings allow a little privacy - everybody doesn't have to hear you ask your buddy if he brought toilet paper. Likewise, you can crank up the frequency and let base camp know you're headed down the South Col after a successful summit bid.
Of course, all this technology requires power. "It always seems to happen that if you send one power supply it dies, but if you send three they all work just fine," says Tibbetts. The holy trinity of power supplies at Everest comprise gasoline generators, batteries, and, as the last resort, solar panels.
The big problem facing compact generators like the Honda EU1000i ($715) - other than the grim reality that every gallon of gasoline must be carried in on a yak or on somebody's back - is the fact that internal combustion engines run poorly even at the lower altitude of base camp. "We had one in there that had been specially retuned for altitude, and it still only ran at about 50 percent efficiency," says Chester. While generators provide the main power at base camp, higher up the mountain, Grabbit 12-volt lithium batteries made by Automated Media Systems of Boston are the backbone electrical supply. The size of a brick, each Grabbit weighs roughly 2 pounds and packs about 20 laptop hours of juice. "We ran a laptop for almost a month off just one Grabbit on the Trango Tower in Pakistan," says Quokka's Greg Thomas. "They're fantastic." They're also only $150 apiece.
Keeping the Climbers Alive and Well
Today synthetic clothing, light and efficient oxygen-delivery systems, space-age protective materials, and titanium alloys have put Everest within the reach of anyone possessing the fitness level necessary to handle it and the $50,000 it typically costs to attempt the climb. Why so much? Consider that the price of a particular ice screw used to fix ropes and ladders along the most difficult stretches of the mountain's South Col route is $48.95 - per screw. (That would be Ushba Mountain Works' Ultimate Screw, made from a proprietary titanium alloy.) Then consider that the job requires hundreds of screws, and you see how costs add up.
No amount of technology will ever erase risk on the mountain, of course - its 29,000-foot-plus summit sits firmly in the jet stream, and even in May, the best time to attempt the climb, 100-mile-an-hour winds and Arctic temperatures are common. But the new gear gives everyone a better chance.
Beck Weathers, the Dallas physician who spent two days in the open above 26,000 feet during the 1996 disaster, was wearing one such technological wonder, the Millet Everest boot (formerly Onesport, $650 per pair). Almost everybody on Everest wears the boot, a feat of materials engineering that weighs only 6.25 pounds per pair (to ogle it, check out www.climbhigh.com/gear/mountaineering/everest.html). Though Weathers lost his right hand, part of his left hand, and most of his nose to frostbite, his feet, encased in 15 mm of Aveolite (closed-cell foam) insulation, were unharmed. The superiority of the boot lies in its warmth and lightness, and the fact that it was the first to come with Gore-Tex and Kevlar gaiters attached. In "normal" conditions, the Kevlar (a material used in bulletproof vests) protects the gaiter and the superhard plastic Pebax boot shell from ice-ax and crampon-point tears. The designers spread the Aveolite throughout the gaiter as well as the boot - to keep you warm, they say, down to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Another ubiquitous piece of technology on the mountain is the Poisk Oxygen system, manufactured in St. Petersburg. The Everest oxygen bottle of choice, it's made of carbon fiber and aluminum (indestructo but light). But you can't call up Patagonia and say, "Ship me 100 Poisk bottles, please"; the people who lead expeditions to Everest order direct from the folks in Russia. (Or you can order fromwww.asian-trekking.com/expedition_index/poisk.htm.) Each 3-liter bottle weighs about 7 pounds when filled to 3,000 psi of pure oxygen. In attempting the summit, most climbers use three bottles. That's $1,170 worth of Poisk cylinders that they consume and sometimes leave behind on the mountain.
Ah, but most of those bottles will be retrieved in May by the Inventa Expedition, a crew of eight that is on Everest specifically to clean up decades' worth of garbage. Half of those climbers will be wearing the Suunto Vector Wristop Computer, whose components - a compass, altimeter, barometer, and watch, all standard-issue by themselves - are elegantly combined into one wristwatchlike product, for only $199. You might assume that in a whiteout on Everest, a global positioning system would save your hide. But a typical GPS has a margin of error of plus or minus 400 yards (only the Navy Seal-issue GPS is accurate to within feet), and that's the difference between remaining alive and falling off the mountain. So the Wristop Computer has most of what a mountaineer needs to stay on track.
In 1999 there was, however, one good reason to have a GPS on Everest. For decades, the mountain has been declared to be 29,028 feet, but Everest wonks have long disputed that height. In 1999, using a complex array of Trimble 4800 GPS receivers, an expedition sponsored by Boston's Museum of Science concluded that Everest - counting the snow on the summit - is, in fact, 29,035 feet and rising. An additional challenge for the scientists, besides simply figuring out how to get the heavy apparatus in place, was to calculate the height of the rock underneath the snow. To find the altitude of the actual mountain, the custom Trimble GPS (with five receivers, $80,000) was coupled with snow-penetrating radar and powered by Grabbit cold-resistant lithium batteries. Pete Athans and Bill Crouse climbed with five Sherpas through the night to reach the summit and set up the equipment, but they ran out of time and couldn't get a firm figure. A new expedition will be going back in May to attempt that feat and confirm 1999's snow-summit results.
In spite of all the technological innovations on Everest, every piece of gear taken up there represents a compromise to the alpinists. After all, they're primarily on Everest to climb it. "The point of what we do isn't to put a lot of pressure on the people in the field," says Quokka's Greg Thomas. And the less work and weight the technology is for the climbers, he adds, the better, ultimately, for us slugs watching at home.
"I'm waiting," says Thomas, "for the webcam that just goes straight up to the satellite and sends the image straight to us. I think within two years we'll have it."
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