Kurt Johnson

The road to Alsea Falls:

See all the gory technical details including GPS coordinates here via Jeffrey Friedl's excellent tool. 

My first time seeing the northern lights; taken from an A320 at 35,000 feet flying a few hundred miles northwest of Detroit.  You can see the right wing with the winglet/tip lit up by the red anticollision strobe (2 second exposure).

I am realizing that my gadget bag carries ~4 hard drives that are not supposed to work about 10,000 feet (ipod, laptop, 2x 4GB microdrives). Hard drives require a certain density of air to let the heads "fly" over the platter and apparently 10,000 feet is the design limit; some devices work fine, some refuse to power up, and some crash forever.

This is suddenly a concern because my time in Peru is going to be largely at 10,000-12,500 feet while next summer's trip to Tibet will be 12,000 feet or higher. Given that a week of photography in someplace like Tibet could potentially generate 10-20 gigabytes of images I'm trying to see if there's any way to avoid carrying a wallet full of solid state CF cards.   If nothing else I could probably just ration my photos and shoot JPG instead of Raw to fit onto a couple of large CF cards…

If anyone has any experience or thoughts I'd love to hear them. 

Update: Everything worked up to 12,600 feet without any issues, although I avoided using the microdrives whenever possible in favor of my solid state card.  The ipod may have balked once around 13,000 feet on Taquile; I had to reset it but I'm not sure whether this was related to the altitude.