Climbing Everest
From the Himalayan Database website:
The Himalayan Database is a compilation of records for all expeditions that have climbed in the Nepal Himalaya. The database is based on the expedition archives of Elizabeth Hawley, a longtime journalist based in Kathmandu, and it is supplemented by information gathered from books, alpine journals and correspondence with Himalayan climbers.
Here’s a visualization of the elevation profile for 1,520 Everest expeditions.
How Was This Made?
I wanted to visualize the elevation profile of each of the 2k+ Everest expeditions. At first I was planning on also visualizing other features of the expeditions such as whether they used oxygen (and for what portions of the climb), what kind of accidents were encountered, the number of climbers, the season, and other things of the sort. Unfortunately, what I discovered is that the data on the expedition’s route was highly unstructured, inconsistent, and/or missing. I ended up needing to “guess” and/or remove expeditions due to missing/conflicting/incorrect data, and decided spending too much time on this visualization was probably not worth the effort. I didn’t have much trust in the assumptions I made and this was a “just for fun” project after all.
To reconstruct an expedition’s elevation profile you need to know the vertical position of each expedition over time. One way to infer this from the data in Himalayan Database (perhaps the best way) is to look at the information on where the team camped and the date. This information is often provided in the database like this:
"BC(13/04,5200m),BC(16/04,5800m),ABC(17/04,6400m),C1(29/04,7066m),xxx(03,21/05,8200m)"
but can sometimes be missing, incomplete, incorrect, or not include the dates/elevations.
Other times the dates/elevations are present but conflict with other information about the expedition. Some times only the campsite name and date are present, but campsite names are not always standardized (in fact most “makeshift” campsites have custom names) so it’s not always possible to infer elevation from campsite name alone.
By cross-referencing information from different expeditions and features in the database I was able to reconstruct the vertical profile of about 1.5k Everest expeditions. I have to admit, I made assumptions here and there so take the final visualization with a grain of salt.
I used Python to clean the data (using lots of regex), then used monotonic cubic interpolations (PchipInterpolator) to smoothly interpolate the waypoints for each expedition. After plotting the data and saving the image as an SVG, I imported it into Adobe Illustrator to edit color alpha, line thickness, textures, and overall layout (the yellow/black color was already present in the original SVG plot along with some key markers that helped me align text while working in Illustrator). The code for the Python portion can be found on GitHub.
If you’re interested, I wrote an article on Medium that goes into more detail on how I created this visualization.