Oh really? Then why is an aluminum ladder bolted to the last pitch near the top?
THAT ain’t cricket, either!
Having read most of the autobiographies and first-hand accounts of the 1996 Disaster, and seen numerous movies and documentaries, this has been, by far the most amusing discussion of climbing Everest.
I read about some other gondola systems that are huge but since they really aren’t used as a ski-lift I didn’t count them. It’s easy to create an infinite series of wires along a horizontal plane. My Google-fu was weak though as I couldn’t find out how long the longest dedicated ski-lift actually was. Is it anywhere close to 5,000 vertical feet?
Why even bother with a ski-lift at that point? You’ve got a turbine-powered rubber band. So slingshot the hikers up the last 5,000 feet!
Or catapult them. That would probably work better because you could fit a wheelchair on the platform and then handicapped hikers would have a way to reach the top.
clearly, hovercraft or jet-pack technology is the way to go…
Survival rate sounds like it would be approximately the same.
It’s got to be a challenge, right? Otherwise what’s the point?
Also, imagine landing on a nice big bouncy cushion on top of the mountain. That would be splendid!
Isn’t there already a secret luxury hotel for the super-rich up there? I saw it on Brenda Starr!
This is a perfect response.
When I was a kid, I had a kite accessory that carried a camera up a kite string. When it got to the top, it clicked the camera shutter, released the sail, and came back down the string.
The strength to weight properties of Kevlar and Spectra rope would make it possible to anchor a 2" diameter rope on top of Mt. Everest with the other end anchored 20 miles or more away at a 45 degree angle. A perfect kite string.
Even hard core mountain climbers would get a thrill out of it, plus a picture of their smiling face on top of Mt. Everest.
Thank you for getting that. Thought nobody else had.
Yes. Off the top of my head, a detachable quad at Sun Valley and the Whistler gondola are both at about 3500 vertical. I’ll have to look it up, but I believe in Europe there are lifts in excess of 5K vertical feet; probably jigback aerial tramways.
There are also some very long multi stage monocable gondolas. One particularly long one is in Iran.
Ski lifts are a topic on which I can speak at length, if anyone has any questions.
Um…we put the motor at the bottom of the ski lift in, say, Chukhung. And if you want lights and a space heater at the top you just run DC current through the actual cable.
How much would a six person gondola lift (like the Bell one that almost worked so well at Lionshead) cost if it were to run from Chukhung to Lhotse and then peak to peak to Everest?
No lift could run in those winds, it’s a non-starter.
No support poles/towers could be transported, created, erected, or otherwise made stationary in order to hold said ski lift, so it’s a non-starter.
Don’t be a pussy. Never heard of a tripod? Ain’t nothin’ more stable than a tripod! My math teacher told me so in geometry class.
I have tremendous wealth remaining from my piracy days and can fund development and fabrication of electrical drilling and earth-moving gear, oxygen tanks, even pressure suits for sissies such as yourself to monitor construction sites.
We got engineer dopers, metalurgist dopers, rock-jock dopers, hell we even got silenus. Let’s design this bitch and price it out!
A nice summation of pretty much all of ralph’s threads.
This one which is a tram is 9186 ft vertical in Chamonix, France
http://unofficialnetworks.com/whos-ski-lift-world-41734/
Everest is itself a tripod, so might as well carve into the top of it directly to house the bullwheel and coffee shop.