c u on top - satyabrata dam

It’s summer time now, the spring is all but gone, many of my friends are right now struggling to stay alive in the higher echelons of Everest and some of the other highest peaks in the world as many of you are now gearing up for the summer treks, and planning your holiday in the hills. Any trip to the mountains, high or low, alpine or Himalayan proportions certainly calls for some experience and expertise to deal with personal injuries and health conditions that may arise on ground. The entire field of mountain medicine is too vast and yet uncharted for me to discuss here, so maybe I would break it down in smaller segments. The majority of the casualties and deaths that do take place in high altitudes are due to just that, the altitude, which plays havoc with the human body and mind. But even in the lower hills, a sudden chilly downpour, an accidental fall in a river or storm can catch you unawares and lead to cold injuries. While not fatal (like high altitude ailments) by themselves, ...

As an extreme mountaineer cum skier cum adventurer with almost my entire lifetime spent in cold places, the two questions that I most often face are: 1. Why do you climb? 2. How cold is it up there (Everest, South or North Pole, Greenland, Alaska, etc) I am still rather fuzzy about the first question since I do not understand this perennial urge deep within to go climbing with or without reason so I would like to answer the second one. What is cold all about! I won't go into the science of 'COLD' or 'ICE' but just my own understanding. The feeling of cold simply put is the act of your body losing heat to the surrounding atmosphere. The effect of losing body heat is also linked with the wind speed at the moment. So to understand cold, we also have to understand, 'Wind Chill Factor'. For the same absolute temperature, the rate of losing heat (in effect the feeling of being cold) would increase with the increase in wind speed. For practical purposes, when we cl...