Most people can only dream of seeing the earth from space; and reaching the summit of Mount Everest (8,848 metres) is a formidable challenge that fewer than 3,000 people have ever achieved. In May 2009, American astronaut, Scott Parazynski became the first human to have done both.
In 2008, NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski embarked on his first expedition from Everest Base Camp, trekking towards the summit. He was forced to turn back on that occasion, but this year he returned for a second try. On May 20th, with the support of his NASA trek team at Everest Base Camp below, he reached the summit at around four in the morning, in time to see the sunrise on the curved horizon.
The Views He’s Seen
Scott has had a remarkable life so far. His education spanned four continents, attending schools in Senegal, Lebanon, Iran and Greece, as well as the U.S. In 1989, he completed his doctorate at Stanford Medical School and then continued to study and practise medicine. With NASA, Scott had the enviable experience of seeing the world from a different and rare perspective, taking space walks while in orbit around the earth. These were part of his five NASA space shuttle missions where he worked on the Russian Mir Space Station and helped construct the International Space Station. This meant he spent hours floating in zero gravity with the blue planet spinning beneath him.
Astronauts and Everest Records
Scott Parazynski is not the only astronaut to crave further adventure after returning from space, and his association with the world of mountaineering is not unique. The Apollo 11 astronaut, Neil Armstrong, teamed up with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1985 to help Hillary set another record. It was more than thirty years after Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had returned safely to Everest Base Camp from the summit, becoming the first team to successfully reach the top. Armstrong flew Hillary to the South Pole in a small plane, helping Hillary become the first person to have stood on both poles and to have stood on Everest’s peak.
Twenty four years later, as part of his acclimatisation preparations for the Everest ascent, Scott and his NASA team approached the mountain via the classic Everest Base Camp Trek route. He then took a number of training runs up the mountain to get his body used to the exertion and thin air. Once he was ready, he headed for the summit with a lump of rock from the moon in hand, which had been collected during Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moon landing.
Photographing the Top of the World
As part of Scott’s second and successful Everest trek, he carried a special, high quality robotic camera to capture panoramic images of the mountain. Called a GigaPan Epic, it is mounted on a tripod and left to scan for a while, collecting a 360 degree image of the view which is then stored on a computer. The results are wide strip of an image that you can zoom into and pan across, with an image that sharpens and refocuses as you interact with it. It’s an interesting preview of what is waiting for trekkers at the culmination of the Everest Base Camp Trek.
The picture shows the many yellow and orange tents scattered among heaps of rock and boulders at the base camp. The fractured ice of the Khumbu Icefall is visible, as is the base of the Nuptse, an adjoining mountain. You can see the Khumbu valley leading up the mountain through which the NASA trek team approached on their Everest Base Camp Trek.
Scott took the camera up Everest to Camp IV. At 7,920 metres, it is believed to be the highest photo of its kind ever taken. However, the photos of Scott at the peak were more conventional: flags of sponsors and charities being held up for the camera, jackets adorned with memorial badges of space missions, and Scott with frosted eyebrows and a pink smiling face.
Author Resource:
Jude Limburn Turner is the Marketing Manager for Mountain Kingdoms, an adventure tour company who have run the Everest Base Camp Trek (http://www.mountainkingdoms.com/itinerary_info.ihtml?schedid=919 ) for over 20 years. They now offer treks and tours worldwide.
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