Strumpie posted:

He was in the SAS (Reserves) with Bear Grylls who he absolutely hates for being a total showboating twat.

Here's his cool website.

Rondette posted:

Ken Jennings in Maphead posted:

...they were writing the first records of every single thing they saw. Their horizon was only three miles away, and they had no way to transcend the limits of their own viewpoint. Consider the laborious process of making the first survey of a region using eighteenth- or nineteenth-century technology. First you need to establish a baseline—a precisely known distance between two points. Today you’d do that with a laser; measure the time it takes light to reflect off a prism, and within seconds you’d have the distance. But back then it meant inching across the countryside with a sixty-six-foot chain, moving the chain like a football referee every time it got fully extended and always taking great care to keep it straight and at a constant elevation (on wooden trestles, if necessary). Marking off a single seven-mile baseline could take weeks.

And then the fun would really start. From both ends of your baseline, you use a bulky instrument called a theodolite to measure the angle to a single landmark—a hilltop, maybe, or a distant church steeple. With a little tenth-grade trigonometry, you use the baseline length and the two angles to compute the distances from each endpoint to the third landmark. Well done! You have just surveyed a single triangle! Now take one of your endpoints and the new landmark, and make that distance the baseline of a second triangle, and one of that triangle’s sides the baseline of a third triangle, and so on. Now please try to resist blowing your brains out when I tell you that the Great Trigonometrical Survey that mapped British India two centuries ago required more than forty thousand triangles to complete and stretched from a five-year project into an eighty-year one.

It was a Herculean task, the Indian survey. This kind of triangulation is difficult enough if you’re mapping, say, Devonshire. It’s almost inconceivable on a subcontinent of dense jungles and the world’s highest mountains,* where torrential rains might halt mapping for months at a time and you have to constantly replace the surveyors killed by malaria. Where there were no easily visible landmarks to sight to or from, rickety bamboo scaffolds would be built, and many of the flagmen stationed atop them fell to their deaths.

...Even more remarkable is the story of Nain Singh, the Bhotian schoolteacher who spent the better part of ten years exploring the Himalayan “roof of the world” for the British. Tibet was closed to Westerners under penalty of death, but Singh was able to smuggle himself across the border and complete the five-hundred-mile trek to Lhasa, where he met the Dalai Lama himself. Singh’s Buddhist prayer wheel concealed a hidden compartment for notes and a compass; his rosary had been doctored so he could use the beads to count his paces. At every place he stopped, he would secretly use his sextant to determine latitude and boil a pot of water to measure altitude. Though he received only twenty rupees a month for his pains, his measurements formed the basis for the only maps of Tibet available for the next fifty years. In 1877, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its prestigious Victoria Medal “for having added a greater amount to our positive knowledge of the map of Asia than any individual of our time.” †

Damo posted:

Nain Singh deserves a lot more attention. A little backstory about how awesome he is and how crazy what he accomplished was. There's a good little blurb about him and the actual process of mapping in his days, in the book Maphead by Ken Jennings.


Bolded part is some awesome secret agent mapping poo poo. Early mappers/cartographers were pretty bad rear end, just in a different way from mountaineers

Damo posted:

Nain Singh deserves a lot more attention. A little backstory about how awesome he is and how crazy what he accomplished was. There's a good little blurb about him and the actual process of mapping in his days, in the book Maphead by Ken Jennings.


Bolded part is some awesome secret agent mapping poo poo. Early mappers/cartographers were pretty bad rear end, just in a different way from mountaineers

Alan Smithee posted:

Wasnt there some reality show that basically has "contestants" who would bring poo poo like cappucino machines

Minrad posted:

Mountains, caves, skiing... ah gently caress it, let's combine all three.

Damo posted:

Nain Singh deserves a lot more attention. A little backstory about how awesome he is and how crazy what he accomplished was. There's a good little blurb about him and the actual process of mapping in his days, in the book Maphead by Ken Jennings.

Bolded part is some awesome secret agent mapping poo poo. Early mappers/cartographers were pretty bad rear end, just in a different way from mountaineers

Minrad posted:

Mountains, caves, skiing... ah gently caress it, let's combine all three.

Damo posted:

I think you are thinking of Sandy Hill (formerly Sandy Hill Pittman), the rich New Yorker from the 1996 Everest Disaster. She brought some crazy luxury poo poo those poor sherpas had to haul up. To her credit she had a deal with NBC to do a video diary and other broadcasts from her climb with the Mountain Madness expedition, so she likely was required to bring some unconventional gear with her. However, yeah I believe she did bring a coffee machine or something like that, among other luxury items to Everest in 1996.

She also was a pretty decently accomplished climber prior to her Everest attempt, summitting Aconcagua, Mount McKinley, Vinson Massif, Mount Elbrus, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kosciuszko, and Puncak Jaya (according to Wikipedia at least) before she attempted Everest. She wasn't a pro 8000er by any means, but she was certainly light years ahead of a certain unfortunate Canadian woman this thread loves to poke fun at when it came to basic mountaineering. Someone more knowledgeable on the subject can likely give more detail on the stuff she brought with her on Everest, it's been a while since I read the various books on the 96 disaster.

hailthefish posted:

The single item that she gets the most crap about is some sort of espresso maker but IIRC it turns out it was more like a Bialetti-type thing and not the gigantic contraption normally envisioned.

Lincoln posted:

Wait, how do you even boil water at that altitude? I mean, you can boil it, yeah, but how hot can it possibly be?

Damo posted:

She also was a pretty decently accomplished climber prior to her Everest attempt, summitting Aconcagua, Mount McKinley, Vinson Massif, Mount Elbrus, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kosciuszko, and Puncak Jaya (according to Wikipedia at least) before she attempted Everest. She wasn't a pro 8000er by any means, but she was certainly light years ahead of a certain unfortunate Canadian woman this thread loves to poke fun at when it came to basic mountaineering. Someone more knowledgeable on the subject can likely give more detail on the stuff she brought with her on Everest, it's been a while since I read the various books on the 96 disaster.

Lincoln posted:

Wait, how do you even boil water at that altitude? I mean, you can boil it, yeah, but how hot can it possibly be?

quote:

Here's a link to an interview with Sandy Pittman from 2006, ten years after the Everest Disaster. She's talking with a reporter to discuss a few things from up on the mountain.

She starts off by mentioning that she doesn't talk about Everest much, as it was "Terrible. At the time, I was in mourning for the loss of our expedition leader, Scott Fischer, I was stunned by my own near-death experience, and my husband had filed for divorce a few months before I went to Everest. It was pretty much the worst year of my life." It's easy to distinguish that she'd been having a hard time with her husband on top of other things, which wasn't evident at all in Into Thin Air. Next, she talks about how much she liked the way Anatoli Boukreev portrayed the climb in his book, and how she wished she'd been able to see Everest how she did years after the experience. She says, "I wish I could've seen Everest then as I do today. I was privileged to have been on Everest three times, and in '96 with such a wonderful team."
Later on in the interview, the subject turns to a very awkward piece of equipment that she'd allegedly brought up the mountain:
A cappuccino maker.

In her defense, she describes the coffeemaker she brought up the mountain as such: "But my coffeepot is a single stovetop aluminum percolator thing that weighs less than two pounds. Once you have the coffee made, you put a little hot water and a spoonful of powdered milk into a lidded mug and shake it really hard to make it foamy. Then you pour coffee into the mug, and it's like a fake cappuccino. I thought it was clever. The men do it and people say, "The dude really loves his java." I do it and they say, "She's so spoiled."" This gives no support that the coffeemaker was an actual cappuccino machine. Sandy was known for bringing luxury items on the trip, but you have to give her some credit for putting up with a fake cappuccino every day. This says a lot for her, because she acted like she couldn't survive without her laptop, cell phone, fax machine, etc. in the novel.
She rounds off the interview with a statement. "I haven't climbed since '96... I wasn't really in a position to keep climbing. I still think climbing any mountain is a great and worthy goal, and no person should be so... judgmental of other people to dismiss Everest... just because it's already been climbed. I assume that everybody... has his own reasons for being there, and I'm not in a position to judge who's got adequate or inadequate experience. We're all adults and capable of making our own decisions."

atomicgeek posted:

I've been tearing through Into Thin Air and I have Dark Summit on my list next--can anyone recommend quality books about K2? I'm looking at Buried in the Sky right now but any recommendations would be welcome.

Rondette posted:

One of the many documentaries I watched mentions that it takes around 3 hours to boil water. Plus you gotta melt it from snow which is obv. not as dense as water so you have to melt poo poo-loads.

As for Sandy, a quick Google search brings this up-

link- http://takemeupmteverest-rnsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/call-mountain-police-sandy-hill-returns.html which is in an utterly horrible font.

She makes a good point about the different reception a man taking that up would have got. One of the other threads went into the extremely sexist and 'boy's club' vibe that goes on at camps. A bit like Mark Inglis in 2006, I think she was unfortunate enough to be the point of anger for something that was just an utter clusterfuck of poor choices, bad luck, and nature being a total bastard.

Damo posted:

I think you are thinking of Sandy Hill (formerly Sandy Hill Pittman), the rich New Yorker from the 1996 Everest Disaster. She brought some crazy luxury poo poo those poor sherpas had to haul up. To her credit she had a deal with NBC to do a video diary and other broadcasts from her climb with the Mountain Madness expedition, so she likely was required to bring some unconventional gear with her. However, yeah I believe she did bring a coffee machine or something like that, among other luxury items to Everest in 1996.

She also was a pretty decently accomplished climber prior to her Everest attempt, summitting Aconcagua, Mount McKinley, Vinson Massif, Mount Elbrus, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kosciuszko, and Puncak Jaya (according to Wikipedia at least) before she attempted Everest. She wasn't a pro 8000er by any means, but she was certainly light years ahead of a certain unfortunate Canadian woman this thread loves to poke fun at when it came to basic mountaineering. Someone more knowledgeable on the subject can likely give more detail on the stuff she brought with her on Everest, it's been a while since I read the various books on the 96 disaster.

atomicgeek posted:

I've been tearing through Into Thin Air and I have Dark Summit on my list next--can anyone recommend quality books about K2? I'm looking at Buried in the Sky right now but any recommendations would be welcome.

Grisly Grotto posted:

pff, a little slack isn't a big deal

her footwork though, woefully bad

Alan Smithee posted:

I vaguely recall a woman climber having sex with a dude in her tent and the sherpas got mad because sex displeases the mountain

#climbergate

Chocobo posted:

I've decided to start a kickstarter to be the first one to fully explore the deepest and largest unmapped diving cave. I've never used scuba gear before but I think I can borrow some and I have a friend that has as swimming pool that I can train in. I'm thinking that I should maybe attempt it without the use of supplemental oxygen because that will attract more crowdfunding backers.

Chocobo posted:

I've decided to start a kickstarter to be the first one to fully explore the deepest and largest unmapped diving cave. I've never used scuba gear before but I think I can borrow some and I have a friend that has as swimming pool that I can train in. I'm thinking that I should maybe attempt it without the use of supplemental oxygen because that will attract more crowdfunding backers.

Chard posted:

has anyone died yet