пятница, 24 апреля 2015 г.

Day 12. April, 21. Base Camp (BC) - Middle Camp (MC)


Today the leader of English expedition Ted Atkins came to us for lunch from the neighbouring camp. Ted is an inventor and manufacturer of the oxygen masks for cylinders. We'll ascend with these masks from the camp of 7700 m up to the top. ted is a nice guy, he was on five eighthousanders. After lunch he gave a lecture about the principles of work of the oxygen mask, possible malfunction and methods of malfunction repair. In general the lecture was very interesting and useful - our lives on altitudes of 8000+ depend on a capacity for work of the oxygen masks.




He chose Liana as a model for mask demonstration: she put the mask off, then put it on again. Ted invented and patented a plastic bottle with a plastic bag inside of it (the bottle says 'TopOut' - it is how his company is called). The problem is in the following: oxygen is supplied from the cylinder evenly, but a person consumes oxygen-air mixture only when breathes in. Consequently, the oxygen, supplied during person's breathing-out, should be somehow accumulated to not being lost, to not going to the atmosphere.

He told us a funny story about his invention: in 2004 during the ascent of Everest from the south Ted was thinking about how to solve the problem, described above. Some mountaineers during the overnight stays in mountains use a bottle - so called piss-bottle - into which they pee at night to not go out of the sleeping bag. So, the urine in his bottle froze and to pour it out, the bottle was placed under sun's rays to thaw. When the urine thawed, Ted started shaking the bottle and at that moment he lit upon that idea. He immediately implemented the idea by placing a condom into a plastic bottle as a filling container, as a temporary solution. It's not clear if it's true or not, but Ted is a great story-teller.


After the lecture Bogomolov and I went to Abramov. Of course I shouldn't have to post these photos and show how some people live here, because it can cause the false impression of luxury and richness. From the other hand, let our relatives won't be distressed for us - we do not sit around the campfire eating tinned stew from tin cans, and we do not live in shelters of branches. On the photo the personal office of Abramov is shown. It could be called 'the room of psychological relaxation' or something like that, but the room is good. Since I promised to write only the truth here, so yeah: some of us live in clover a little. 



Otherwise how to call the heated and lighted facilities of dining room and computer room, toilets, banya? I'll give a description of the club later. Well, yesterday, after the Ted Atkins' lecture Bodomolov and I went to take photos of the sponsors' flags against the background of Everest and BC. The view of Everest is the best from here - from the BC, but there is one problem: the sun during the day moves in such a way, that the faces of mountaineers in the photos are always in the shadow if the Everest is in the background. Or they have to take unnatural poses, to throw back one's head, etc.  

In short: we took photos of all flags, but we had no time yesterday to send them and to write corresponding letters: we had to much work and then the sun was already down and we had no Internet. I'll try to send them now, at least some of them, since after breakfast we are leaving for the Middle Camp (5800 m) and will stay there for the night. There is no Internet there. We will be back tomorrow after the lunch time.  


Комментариев нет:

Отправить комментарий