The Pyramid Laboratory

31 March 2008

We've been at the Pyramid for three nights now and the blog has taken a back seat as several members of our team (including our chief blogger!) are not adjusting to the altitude quite as well as we expected. On the way up here Mickey found great pleasure in shoving the camera in everyone's face to determine how they were feeling - paying us particular attention if we were feeling a little under the weather... Well it seems the tables have turned... Mickey is in bed on oxygen treatment and has been for the past 24 hours! Not to worry, he is being well cared for by not one, but three doctors fussing over him every minute. Apparently being fit and sure of yourself does not save you from Mountain Sickness!!

Fair to say though, we’ve all suffered a little - good sleep is hard to come by up here, with central sleep apnea affecting nearly all of us. Talk around the breakfast table usually involves rating our headaches out of 100 as they are commonplace in the morning.

Enough complaining – it’s beautiful at 5050m above sea level. The Pyramid Laboratory and our lodge are in an isolated valley amongst the mountains. The Lobuche glacier is a stone’s throw from the lab and we have great views of Pumori and Nuptse just to mention a few from a ridge above our hideout. Every day has started out with blue skies and plenty of sun (thank goodness, as the Pyramid runs mostly on solar power!) but by late afternoon each day we’ve had a light snowfall. Most of the crew have had a chance to explore around the area when they are not taking part in the experiments, and there will be a lot more exploring to come in the remaining 10 days or so…

Onto the real reason for being here – the science. I’m delighted to say so far so good. We had a thousand little hassles and trials during the unpacking and setting up phase, including finding several broken pieces of equipment in the cases that got brought up here by yaks… Thank goodness we have so many handy men in the group (engineers, mechanics, electricians) – everything is fully functioning now except one gas analyzer that is older than I am, and so we’ve happily laid it to rest.

The experiments are running as smoothly as one could hope for in these kind of conditions. We are running four sleep studies a night plus countless other tests during the day, all in spite of unreliable battery power, lab temperatures below freezing and tired experimenters!! Let’s hope this continues for the remainder!!

That’s all for now, hopefully Mickey will be up and about soon and updating you further, we’ll try and get some pictures of the lab and experiments on here soon. And please excuse my writing skills, I blame it on the hypoxia!!

Kate