| Summit Science Measuring the world's biggest mountain |
Big-Mountain Science
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
Well, it sounds very simple but it depends on two things. One is a helluva good group of people on the ground doing the work. Not only very, very good climbers, but an expert guy at Base Camp who is a scientist and has been teaching the climbers how to use some of this equipment at very high altitude. You know, anyplace around the United States on a nice clear day the barometer is around 30 inches. On Everest, it's 9.3. You can't use your mind very much up there, that's why people make all sorts of mistakes. So when you're doing very high altitude scientific work we're not only going to have some very bright guys, some very powerful guys up there, but we're also going to have a very sharp guy at base camp, Fred Blume, working under Dr. Roger Bilham — of the University of Colorado Geophysics Department.
Mountain Zone: What exactly will you be doing to collect measurements?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
What we're trying to do is to put two drill holes in bedrock. One of them will be at 26,000 feet at the South Col, which is the spot from which you start the final ascent of Everest on the day you select to make the climb. The other one is going to be about 150 horizontal feet, I don't believe it's more than 50 vertical feet below the top, which is essentially the highest bedrock in the world. We put these little bolts in there, and these we hope will be revisited, not necessarily every year, but at intervals a long, long time into the future to show the rate at which Mount Everest is still going up.
Mountain Zone: How did you get involved in this sort of geophysical research?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
Well, I started out way back... I retired in 1980, and I decided I didn't want to go to Florida and play shuffleboard, and that it would be fun to say "I would like to do now something that I would have loved to have done 40 years ago. But I didn't have the time to do it because I ran the museum, and what could I do today with the equipment that is available today?"
Mountain Zone: All your work is highly regarded by geographers and mountaineers alike. How did you get interested in mountain geography?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
There president of the National Geographic wrote me a letter in 1936 and said, "Is there something exciting that hasn't been done in Alaska that you would like to try and do?" And I said yes. And they gave me $1000 to get together with Pacific Alaska Airways and make the first large format photographic flights over Mt. McKinley, which we did in July, 1936. Same airplane, incidentally, that Amelia Arhardt used the following year. We made the flights from Fairbanks, which is 150 miles away. We made three different flights at different altitudes on different days. I got hooked, I got fascinated by McKinley. Then during the war I was the Air Force representative on the US Army Alaskan test expedition, which was organized by the quartermaster general in Washington to test all sorts of cold weather equipment in the middle of the summer somewhere where it was really cold. Several of us... several others at QM all agreed that the perfect place to be really cold in July was the basin right near the top of McKinley at 18,000 feet.
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
Two of us made the landing. Terrance Moore, who was then president of the University of Alaska, he was an excellent pilot. He and I got our pilot's licenses -- I think his was 1933 and mine was 1934. My license is 32898. There are not many of them around nowadays. We cooked up the idea of landing there because it would make it much, much easier to get up on McKinley rapidly, and of course it proved to be very definitely true.
Mountain Zone: When you first arrived on the glacier, could you have imagined the scene there now?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
I would never have dreamed it. I've been many times asked what you would do in order to minimize the awful accidents that are happening up there now. And I've always had the same answer -- they'll never do it -- I said don't allow people to fly into that spot by air. It's just like the old route from the north side of McKinley where there was no landing. By the time you got to the bottom of the mountain, all the people who didn't know how to climb, and all the people who were inexperienced would be all sorted out and dropped by the wayside, and by the time you got to 10,000 feet, there'd be nobody left but people who didn't know what the hell they were doing.
Mountain Zone: How did you become acquainted with Todd Burleson and the folks at Alpine Ascents International?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
We had our first contact 1991 or 92. In 1992, his party then brought up some laser prisms which we set up, or they set up for me, on the top of Everest. We observed them from Namche Bazaar. Boy, those laser machines are marvelous. We made observations on them on three different days, at three different times and over an 18 mile distance. All of those sites were within 2 centimeters of each other in 18 miles.
Mountain Zone: What will you be relying on mostly for measurements?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
It's 100% GPS. With the lasers we were simply trying to make very detailed sites on the mountain which would give us some very precise distances and very precise vertical angles. But vertical angles make no sense when you're near Everest because the mass of Everest tends to throw the plumb-bob toward the mountain. You get very accurate readings from GPS. However, there's one problem with them. They're great when you're trying to calculate the difference, the rate at which the mountain is going up. Because they give you with enormous accuracy the distance down from the satellite. If you reoccupy a station five years later, that's going to be a lot less, maybe three or four centimeters a year less. But it gives you the distance down from the satellite, it doesn't give you the altitude above sea level. [See Fred Blume's column at left for a detailed explanation of the measurements being done this year on Everest.]
Mountain Zone: What's the smallest movement you can detect with the GPS equipment?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
I think that if you run in the South Col for six or eight hours, you're going to be within a centimeter of where you think you are. It's tremendously accurate.
Mountain Zone: What's next for you?
Click to hear Washburn's answer.
I remember one of my very good Alaskan pilots, he said, "Let's skin one skunk at a time." I haven't any plans. My god, you know I'll be 87 in June, and I ought to lay off of this stuff. But the thing that I love to do is to work with bright young people. And guys like Roger Billham and Fred Blume, working with Roger to get his PhD, and these guides — the guides we've got are absolutely marvelous guys. It's a pleasure to be working with them and it's a delight to have them willing to let me work with them.
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