Case Study: Dave Hahn
Occupation: Pro climber and mountain guide
Gear: 13-inch Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with 128GB solid-state hard drive, 4GB RAM, running Final Cut Express, Aperture, Logic Express, Microsoft Office 2008, and iWork '09
Hahn has climbed Everest 15 times.
When professional mountain guide and expert climber Dave Hahn is packing for an expedition up Mount Everest, he always brings along the essentials: climbing gear that’s in working order, clothes warm enough for the Himalayan clime, and his MacBook equipped with a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD).
Unlike standard hard drives--which have moving parts that can break through mishandling or because the air pressure at high altitudes prevents the disc from spinning--SSDs have no moving parts. As such, they aren’t subject to mechanical failures or delays the way standard hard drives are, and they tend to outperform drives with moving parts. Of course, they’re also much more expensive. To add a 128GB SSD to a 15-inch 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, for example, you’ll pay $200 more--whereas a 500GB standard hard drive costs nothing. Doubling the SSD’s capacity to 256GB racks up an extra $650 over the laptop’s base price.
On a recent Eddie Bauer–sponsored expedition up Everest, Hahn encountered plenty of hardships, including long, grueling days getting from point A to a much-higher-up point B, staving off respiratory illnesses, and enduring freezing-cold nights. Nonetheless, Hahn and his expedition team were able to rely on a few constants while scaling the mountain--their MacBooks.
As snow falls, Dave Hahn looks out from Everest Basecamp.
As a way to showcase a line of its First Ascent pro climbing gear, Eddie Bauer commissioned Hahn and five other world-class climbers to head out with a production crew and ascend the world’s highest mountain. The trip was primarily designed as a climbing expedition, but Hahn says “production was important as far as being able to tell the story.” Having a reliable and creative production team was integral to keeping the Born Out There blog (blog.firstascent.com) updated with detailed dispatches and engaging videos of the team’s daily trials and tribulations. The team included three video producers equipped with a Sony Ex1 and two Sony Ex3s, a still-camera photographer, and one designated blogger--in this case, Hahn, who, in addition to working as a mountain guide, EMT, and ski patroller, is also a writer.
Each time Hahn sat down to do a dispatch, he’d pound out a written blog and the production team would also post a series of photos and a couple of minutes of edited video. Though Hahn has climbed Everest 15 times, he says, “This is the most extensive blogging I’ve been involved in--and I’ve tried to do it on a number of trips.” Apparently his extreme blogging aspirations were a few years ahead of available technology.
“I started getting MacBooks a couple of years ago with expeditioning in mind. I had PCs and I saw the Macs around me just whirring away.” But rather than outfit a PC laptop with a solid-state drive, Hahn bought a MacBook in 2007--equipped with a standard hard drive. “I was disappointed that my hard drive didn’t work at Everest Basecamp that year, but I was blown away by how much I liked the Mac and how trouble-free everything seemed to be.”
The First Ascent guide and production team catch up on their email, blogs, and RSS feeds after a long day.
Something about OS X just clicked with Hahn. “I was really pleased with how everything fit so well together and how normal tasks were anticipated, explained, and executed. My first MacBook was still working great and meeting all of my non-Everest needs, so I was just biding my time until the solid-state Mac models came out with big enough memory last fall,” at which point he purchased his current Everest-ready 13-inch unibody MacBook.
Hahn wasn’t the only Mac user on the Born Out There Everest trip. The entire production crew came packing SSD-equipped 15-inch unibody MacBook Pros.
Gerry Moffatt, Hahn’s production partner, agrees that at such high altitudes, SSDs are the only way to prevent the computers from crashing. With a standard hard drive, Moffatt says, the low air pressure would collapse the drive and stop the disc from spinning. But with the SSD MacBook Pros, the crew had no problems. “At 21,500 feet, they worked great.”
Head of production Gerry Moffatt (right) and First Ascent video editor Tom Grimshaw (left) review the day's video footage in a teahouse in Namche Bazaar on the approach to Everest Basecamp.
So how did the crew manage to upload their blog posts and stay connected to the Internet from their remote location on Everest? The team used a broadband global area network (BGAN) to access a satellite phone network that provided enough bandwidth to log on and upload their content. But it was still a challenge to power all the gear. A flexible solar panel plugged directly into the various laptops and cameras kept them juiced up.
After 70 days and 29,035 feet, the Born Out There crew returned home. Hahn recently embarked on another adventure—an annual summer tour of the Northwestern United States, during which he takes clients on climbs in Washington and Alaska. Though he lives in Taos, New Mexico, Hahn refers affectionately to Mt. Rainier, which he’s climbed more than 200 times, as his “office.” Sure, a laptop can’t help you when you’re cold, hungry, thirsty, and clinging to an ice-covered trail on your way to Rainier’s summit. But Hahn’s life as a professional climber, guide, and writer wouldn’t be nearly as trouble-free without his MacBook. For more about Dave Hahn, see www.mountainguides.com/hahn.shtml.
