Live on the Web: Mount Everest
But the event won't be broadcast on television; it'll be seen on the Web. So will climbers' vital signs, and other things relevant to an Everest climb.
It all takes place on "The Mountain Zone," which plans to provide live multimedia coverage of the final ascent. That may come as soon as Sunday.
Climbing interest
Climbing the 29,028-foot-high Everest has, of course, been done. The first to do so, officially, were Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal in 1953. Since then, even non-climbers have made it up.
But the deaths of eight climbers in a 1996 expedition -- detailed in several books, including Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" -- created a new public curiosity about Everest, and about mountain climbing in general.
The last two years have seen several movies about the high life from Hollywood and the TV networks; you can even see Everest in IMAX. This year's expedition is showing up in regular dispatches in USA Today.
But if all goes as planned, Internet users will be able to follow the climb in real time on The Mountain Zone, a Seattle, Wash.-based site that will relay audio, video and biometric signals from the handful of climbers who hope to make their way up the "South Col" route to the summit later this month.
Taking Everest's measure
The expedition, led by three-time Everest veteran Wally Berg, will be carrying gear devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab to measure, among other things, the mountain's height.
Besides biometric data and audiovisual communications, the gear, which reached base camp (elevation: 17,500 feet) on Thursday, will provide an exact GPS location for each climber, and information such as local pressure, humidity and ambient lighting.
"We're going to be tracking their heart rates and stuff, and what if something goes wrong, and the beeps start slowing down, and stop?" asked Greg Prosl, a Mountain Zone co-founder. "That's the kind of stuff you'll be dealing with."
Despite the variety of data the instruments will be sending down, the set-up weighs less than a pound for each climber.
A mountain load of data
Besides garnering data on high-altitude physiology, the climbers will also be installing gear to measure the degree to which Everest is being altered by tectonic forces over time, and will attempt to find out where the snow stops and the peak's bedrock begins.
"It's an incredible wealth of data," Prosl said.
Not bad for an excursion to the highest point on Earth, where the low oxygen and air pressure cause the brain to operate sluggishly at best.
Of course, safety is the climbers' first priority. This may mean that they can't carry all of the equipment. But at the moment, there are no plans to leave the equipment behind.
This is the first of a series of ZDNN articles on the 1998 American Mount Everest Expedition. Friday's planned piece will deal with the scientific aims of the expedition, and the dangers of carrying them out.