Goddess-mother of the Earth

[pozorvlak]

I've finally finished reading The Turquoise Mountain, Brian Blessed's account of his first attempt on Everest, and of the filming of the documentary Galahad of Everest. It's taken me ages because in the early stages I skipped about a lot, and it's hard to get excited about reading a bit of the book that you've read before - the time I've taken to

Comments

[pozorvlak]

I'm having a bit of trouble finding a comprehensible method of calculating water boiling points at a given altitude (or a table that goes up to 7000m), but I'll accept your claim that melting and boiling the water takes roughly the same amount of energy :-)

The other factor, which I should have realised from my own limited camping experience, is that cooking takes significantly longer when your surroundings are cold - all the heat from the burner gets sucked away into the atmosphere. Even in Wales, we found it was essential to do as much cooking as possible before nightfall, and at -20C this effect's going to be immense.

Still, I think the idea of an HTPB/N20-powered camping stove has legs :-)

[ext_5743]

Having made tea from snow on a Primus stove at -20C at least a dozen times, I can vouch for the fact that it takes a *long* time. It also doesn't help that a huge snow block produces a depressingly small amount of water, so that you have to keep adding snow blocks as you go along in order to produce a full pan of boiling water. The recommended technique we used was to make extra water whilst the stove and pan and tent (we were cooking inside) are warm and then store it in Thermos flasks overnight. Even at -25, a Thermos of water won't freeze in the tent overnight, and is usually still tepid in the morning, which gives you a massive headstart on that first cup of tea of the morning.

On the physics, I'd agree that the latent heat issue is the main problem when making boiling water from snow. At altitude you've also got to consider that the lack of oxygen may reduce the combustion efficiency of your stove, too.

[antoniabaker]

am currently living in high altitude, on the plus side tea is cool enough to drink a few seconds after you pour it, i don't know if that makes sense from a physics point view.

On the down side it is giving me nose bleeds, had a horrendous one at a hot tub party while wanderign around in a bikini drinking veuve cliquot (envy my job much?) and it did not add to my sex appeal.