In 1909, the flashy Italian explorer Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, organised a team of mountaineers to climb K2, which is still considered to be the world’s toughest peak for climbers. Travelling with a brass bed for the duke, the team made it to 6,666 metres – about 2,000 metres shy of the summit – before turning back. Their chosen route, dubbed “the Abruzzi spur” in his honour, has become the favoured route to the top.
In the ensuing decades, countless teams have tried to summit the 8,611m peak, the world’s second largest, with disappointing results. There have been just 246 successful ascents – more than ten times that number have climbed Everest.
For the third time in the past five years, my older brother Chris Warner is on K2 trying to get to the top. Naturally, he and his team are blogging as they go.
In a geeky nod to the duke, Chris and crew are carrying – along with ice axes, crampons, karabiners and enough freeze-dried food to last them several months – a laptop, a BGAN mini satellite dish and a hand-held camcorder, so that they can send video bulletins and detailed dispatches to a small web production team in the United States.
Almost daily, Chris and his team of climbers send several megabytes worth of photos, text and video to the production team for uploading onto Shared Summits, the expedition’s website. The footage often lands on YouTube and MySpace, and it is also being carried on specialist climbing sites such as Climbing.com and MountEverest.com. More than 10,000 people have subscribed to the e-mail updates and page views have topped 1.5 million since May 21, day one of the expedition. On the rare day when there is no update, e-mails trickle in to the site operator, Chris Everett, in Maryland, asking: what happened to the climbers? Are they safe?
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A decade ago, it took, at best, six days to get word to an editor at The Baltimore Sun, the newspaper that regularly follows his summit attempts, Chris informed me via e-mail yesterday from base camp at 6,000 metres.
“Now we are the media,” his e-mail continued. “Our website hosts the content, which can be uploaded as fast as typing an e-mail. We have direct contact with our audience. They write to us, ask us questions, giving us story ideas.”
As he reminded me, sending live video feeds from the most remote locations on earth has been with us for more than a decade – if you could afford the equipment. Now, the kit is inexpensive enough and, crucially, light enough, to be regarded as essential mountaineering equipment.
“What blows my mind is that I can do it, and for so little money,” he says. “This is not a big-budget media event. It is truly five guys in the field, trying to climb a mountain, supported by three guys, working part time on this, in the US.”
At the time of our e-mail correspondence earlier this week, the mountain was being socked with brutal weather yet again, forcing the team to wait it out at base camp before they make another summit bid, weather depending, in the coming days.
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For Chris, that meant catching up on e-mails from website sponsors and fielding questions from TV network executives wondering if he has enough footage for a half-dozen 30-minute TV episodes. Also, they inquired, does Chris have any more ideas for similar adventures in which he could build an audience through daily web dispatches and then, later, provide footage for a TV series?
The prospect of cutting a deal on future programming was a distraction he didn’t want to dwell on at such oxygen-deprived levels, he said. The summit of K2, he wrote, was the goal.
The Duke of the Abruzzi, no doubt, would have agreed.
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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters’ internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com