A Physicist on Everest

[ksmith]

Came upon this link in today’s Lunch Links posting over at The Washington Monthly. I have to get this book:

In 1997 physicist Francis Slakey set out to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean – he dubbed it the first “global surf-and-turf.” In his recently published memoir, To the Last Breath: A Journey of Going to Extremes, he describes the geophysics of waves, the body’s physiological breakdown at high-altitude, and the technology of climbing, as well as the people he encounters and the challenges he endures on his 12-year journey.

The section excerpted in last month’s Scientific American describes the effects of a low-oxygen environment on the human body. There is some telling, but mostly, it shows. It is harrowing:

As I made my way down the southeast ridge of Everest, with Ang Nima and Jim Williams now a few hundred feet above me, I saw a climber from our team, Bob Clemey, on his knees, gloves at his side, with his bare hands delicately gliding over the surface of the snow.

Depleted and needing warmth, Clemey saw with absolute clarity that a rock protruding from the snow was glowing red hot. He realized that lava from the very core of the earth was lifted up to the surface of Everest and was heating that rock. So he stripped off his gloves and began warming his hands over the rock like it was a campfire.

In reality, there was no glowing red rock, no lava. There was just a climber with bare hands frozen as solid as clubs, fingers gripping snow in a twenty-below-zero blizzard.

Clemey’s oxygen tanks were drained. There was no way of knowing how long he had been there or when he had run out of oxygen.

Our second crisis had begun.

The first crisis is described earlier in the section.

I have to get this book.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Comments

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

Wow!

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I already bought the ebook over at iTunes.

I read the Amazon reviews first. Some folks took exception to the author's tone--a little too pleased with himself, according to them. Self-absorbed. Folks who have surfed and climbed thought his explanations too basic.

Well, I have never surfed or climbed, and I found the depth of internal thought in the section I read to be educational. Yes, I want to know how things feel. I want that detail. That way, I don't have to climb Everest myself.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

I think as writers we are naturally more interested in the internal feelings--insight into the people who do things--and less in whether the feelings expressed are socially acceptable to others.

[naomikritzer]

I read "Into Thin Air" last month and found it really fascinating. What he says about oxygen depletion is that you simply have no reserves whatsoever -- you're slow, you're stupid, and you can't get warm. (He questions the decision by one of the guides to climb without oxygen, for all of these reasons.)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that "Into Thin Air" is buried in the paper TBR stack. I should dig it out, but I have heard that it is pretty intense. I need to be in the right frame of mind for stories like that.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

It is intense. I read it um...however many years ago, can't recall. But I remember the intensity.