David CazaresGoogle has released Street View images of some of the most famous mountains on Earth.
Travel vicariously to Mt. Kilimanjaro:
And Mt. Everest base camp:
Roberto Baldwin has the story on Wired.com:
One lucky engineer, who happens to be a passionate mountaineer, led the Google Mountain Enthusiast team during a project that was strictly a labor of love for all involved.
“There’s a social benefit to using these tools to tell the story in these environments. A chance to really connect to whats on the ground with a rich imagery so they can see what it looks like and feels like to be there,” says Dan Fredinburg, who is a technical program manager for security and privacy when he isn’t scaling summits …
His passion for climbing almost got the better of him while climbing Everest. He really, really wanted to go all the way to the top, but the team arrived just before the summit window in October.
“It was only planned to go to the basecamp,” says Fredinburg. “I did try to convince my guides to take me further up. I was very excited when I got to basecamp.”
His enthusiasm led to an awkward conversation with the guides, who refused to take him any higher than base camp. He pressed the issue, and offered to pay them for their trouble. Still, they refused. It eventually dawned on him that perhaps it was too risky. So he asked about the odds of dying.
“Certain,” came the response. “100 percent.”
