| Geek on Everest - A tale of High Tech vs. High Altitude (Part 1) |
| Technology |
| By Mark Kahrl on 6/4/2007 7:14 PM |
The Mission
As an IT professional, I rarely get out of the office. I have worked from home and telecommuted for the last few years so my long office hours are tolerable. So it was more of a surprise to me than anyone else when I was recruited by Altitude Films to go on an expedition to Mount Everest of all places. We were tasked with an enormous challenge - to produce constantly refreshed content for a vast multi-media web portal, and to do this while climbing the world's highest mountain. I would join up with an elite crew of climbers, cameramen and production personnel and we would attempt to climb the worlds highest peak, film it and bring it to the world live on the web.
The Team
For this most challenging of projects we had both a production leader, Anthony Geffen, world renowned documentary producer, and elite climber, author and businessman, Conrad Anker as our climbing leader.
For this difficult project, I teamed up with gadget guru and professional climber, Kevin Thaw (http://www.kevinthaw.com), often heralded as Britain's best all-round climber. In addition to his climbing and mountaineering skills, Kevin also has a knack for gadgets and web development and had acted as both lead climber and web content provider on a number of previous mountain expeditions. Additionally, I had worked with Kevin on a number of web projects before, where we found our complimentary skills and synergy allowed us to produce top quality work.
I had actually first met Kevin on a climbing expedition to Patagonia - we were on different trips but our paths would cross many times in the future. A few years later, myself, Kevin, and another of the climbers on the Everest expedition, Leo Houlding, found ourselves in northern Patagonia questing after remote and massive unclimbed cliffs. We endured torrential downpours and hacked with machetes for days through triple canopy rain forest, only to nearly run out of supplies and find more abysmal weather. We precariously egressesed the remote valley we were in by rafting a turbid glacial river with rafts we had purchased at Wal-Mart. We never even touched the rock on that trip but it was still a grand adventure! Having survived and bonded on the Patagonia trip, I was delighted to meet up with Kevin and Leo in Kathmandu for our adventure on the north side of Mount Everest.
As for myself, I had a variety of skills that led to my recruitment for this project (http://kahrlconsulting.com). I had been programming computers since I was fourteen, and had worked the last ten years as a freelance software developer on all manner of projects. I am the developer for Snow Pilot (http://snowpilot.org) which is the worlds leading snow science software and it also happens that Conrad himself was instrumental in getting the funding for this important project.
When not on the computer I spend as much time in the mountains as possible. Ive done extensive climbing and skiing in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And despite all of my time coding, Ive gotten above 10,000 feet in the Sierra almost weekly for the past seven years. Ive climbed the 3,000 foot face of El Capitan multiple times, been on two expeditions to Patagonia, summitted in Patagonia, and have completed technically difficult routes, as well as new routes in the Sierra Nevada and Canada. Ive spent my share of time both on the computer and in the mountains, which gave me all the skills needed to be a computer geek on Everest.
The Mountain
Our expedition was to go to the North side of Mount Everest, approaching from Tibet. We were to re-trace the steps of the fateful 1924 British expedition. It was on this expedition that two British climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine made a bold and ground-breaking summit attempt. The two climbers were last seen high on the mountain going strong for the summit before vanishing into the mist and never being seen alive again, leaving one of mountaineerings greatest mysteries. The purpose of the trip was re-trace the steps of Mallory and Irvine and to film, document and conduct forensics on the fate of these two climbers, and to answer the most compelling question: could Mallory and Irvine have made it to the summit of Everest twenty-nine years before the first documented ascent by Sir Hillary?
The North side of Mount Everest is a hostile, remote and forbidding place. The air is thin and cold, the wind howls incessantly. It never rains but it snows often, even in summer. This side of the mountain was not officially climbed until 1960 when a massive Chinese expedition of 400 employed siege tactics, and endured significant loss of life to first force their way to the summit. This is a place that is hostile to humans and even more so to machines.
A dusty dirt road winds up from the Tibetan plateau up the Rongbuk valley where it ends at a massive moraine at just over 17,000 feet. This is the North side Everest base camp, it is several thousand feet higher than the highest mountain in the Alps, or the continental US. Everest base camp is an isolated wilderness outpost - above it rise only massive mountains and vast glaciers.
In order to assure that we would be able to continually send a large quantity of web content from the mountain we would need a diverse and redundant selection of technology. Hardware is not really designed to work in the conditions we were taking it to. We would be living in tents; all of our equipment would be subject to extreme cold as well as vast temperature fluctuations. We would have generators at base camp but above base camp we would have only battery or scant solar power.
The air is very thin and machinery such as hard drives have a very high failure rate in this rarefied atmosphere. Delicate equipment would have to be transported over miles of rugged terrain by Yak or porters. We are very much isolated from the usual consumer grid, so all the equipment we need would have to last for the entire trip or be repaired in the field and there would be no chance to purchase or replace broken hardware in this remote location.
The Hardware
Laptop computers provide most of the computer power we need on the mountain but they have to stay lower on the mountain, at or below advanced base camp at 21,000 feet. For redundancy we brought three laptops, all different brands, just in case one particular brand proved problematic. The primary mode of failure for laptops in this environment is hard drive failure since hard drives rely upon the viscosity of air to provide lubrication and damping among the moving parts, the same manner that oil provides lubrication and damping for moving machine or engine parts.
Due to low pressure and cold temperatures, the viscosity of air is a fraction of what it is at sea level and hard drive failure is common. Each laptop had two spare hard drives, each hard drive had the operating system, and all of the mission critical software pre-installed upon it before we left. When hard drives fail we could change out a new one in several minutes since they were pre-built. Data was backed up daily to either CD/DVD or to flash drives, since these media were much less subject to failure at altitude. It didnt take long for the first hard drive to fail - we lost the first hard drive at a mere 12,500 feet en-route to base camp.
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