Now you can't even scale Mount Everest without a drone buzzing overhead Drone maker DJI has claimed a world first by flying one of its Mavic 3 drones around the peak of Mount Everest, capturing some pretty great footage in the process. The idea to fly a drone around the world's highest mountain was developed with the team from Chinese photography website and photographer organization 8KRAW, which …
It's a good YouTube video, nice to watch but think how much better a BBC documentary video production would have been while working with video produced from the drone by the BBC - the BBC has classic film and production people resulting in wonderful documentaries!
No chance of any peace almost anywhere accessible. One of my hobbies is wildlife sound recording, but with the advent of electric cars a hitch has emerged and is getting ever more significant. Distant IC traffic presents a fairly stable low frequency noise almost entirely below about 120 Hz ( a mixture of tyre noise and engine noise) with very weak harmonics that can usually be masked. Distant electric vehicles present in addition to the low frequency tyre noise a quite broad band of harmonic rich noise in the 400-1200 Hz band - right in the middle of wanted natural sounds, so they're well nigh impossible to filter out in the absence of very sophisticated (and therefore expensive) tech.
IIRC, there's a small cave that provides a degree of shelter just before the final approach where climbers typically take time for a last brew before they attempt the summit - and they get to share that time next to the perfectly preserved dead body lying in the mouth of the cave known as 'Green Boots' who's lain there since the 1990s. Whilst I've heard that Green Boots' body has finally been recovered at some point in the last couple of years, I think that must have served as a very strong reality check for many climbers with the end so nearly in sight, particularly given how dangerous that last push is when altitude, low oxygen levels and being so close to the goal start to effect common sense.
Yep I remember even around the altitude of base camp you could make a cup of tea with boiling water and drink it without adding milk or waiting for it to cool down. Guess who forgot when we descended to lower altitudes!
Sherpas also don't understand people from Yorkshire, they'd use one small tea bag for a 2 litre flask of water, it was just slightly tinted water! Needed some Yorkshire tea to show them what tea was really like.
Coffee not needing to be as hot was OK though, there was a great bakery and coffee shop in Dingboche (though only at half the altitude of Everest) and I didn't visit but was told the knock-off Starbucks in Lukla was better than the real ones!
Back to the film the images do look amazing and remind me it is time to go back to the area (mixed emotions as several areas I visited were decimated in the earthquakes).
Went trekking on the Annapurna trail in 2018 with a friend. We were carrying our own gear so fairly minimal, a couple of changes of clothes, washkit, and a kindle for me. He sacrificed everything to pack his drone and SLR, to capture the sights. You can imagine his delight at discovering the whole area had been made a No Drone Zone about a week before our arrival...
IMO anyway, while flying a flying a drone from the summit of Mt Everest is a cool thing to have done, it doesn't come near Klaus Ohlmann's 2014 adventure when he made a 582km out-and-return soaring flight from Pokara to Mt Everest, using the point above its summit as his turnpoint. This flight was made in a Stemme VT10 self-launching glider. That flight was bookended by flying the VT10 from Germany to Pokara for a Himalayan meteorological research project based in Pokara, 126km east of Kathmandu. After his soaring flight over Everest, he flew the Stemme back to Germany from Pokara.
The Stemme was flown to and from Nepal because that was cheaper, easier and quicker than using surface transport, to say nothing of the hassle that dealing with customs and shipping paperwork would have been. Anyway, those flights would have much been more fun than sitting on a ship or in an airliner.
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