Portrait: Ralf Ohnmacht
The bivouac boxes are a very idealistic affair…
“During an aid mission in Lebanon a few years ago, I was contacted by two Tyroleans I had never met before, who had met during relief work in Nepal immediately after the devastating earthquake in 2015.
The businessman and Nepal friend Josef Einwaller and the extreme mountaineer Stephan Keck have jointly developed the idea of making the Trashi Labtsa Pass, the only connection between the very poor Rolwaling region, which was hit very hard by the earthquake, and the Everest region of Kumbu, which is successful in terms of tourism, safer. With the help of a “bivouac box” at an altitude of 5750 m, a base could promote the exchange of goods, a spillover of trekking tourism and consequently an economic strengthening of the Rolwaling region.
I was asked to provide this emergency shelter and immediately agreed. A good two years later, an incredibly great team stood in the barren glacier world of Rolwaling on a 100 m high rock above the glacier moraine in front of the finished “David-Lama Bivouac”, dedicated to the exceptional mountaineer who had died far too early in the meantime.
“We now also build UFOs”
The finished bivouac consists of wood, sheep’s wool and an aluminum shell, stands on the rock like a spider with the help of a framework and thus only interferes with nature through a few holes. The distance from the ground and the spherical shape create a clean, low-turbulence airflow. This means that no snow cornices can form and the emergency shelter remains snow-free and dry all year round.
As with our projects at CONENGA Engineers, it was important here to deal analytically and creatively with pressures, temperatures, flows and heat transfer coefficients in order to successfully combine longevity, sustainability and safety, overcoming boundaries and developing new collaborations!
About Ralf
Born in Innsbruck, Ralf Ohnmacht grew up in a family of architects and technicians. His personal career path also led him in this direction. After graduating in mechanical engineering, he worked as a technical advisor and logistician for Doctors Without Borders – mainly in Africa. However, he also worked in Myanmar and Haiti. Ralf has helped to improve the lives of people who have been hit hard by fate. Back in Austria, he now appreciates the “obvious” things in life: the cool wind in Austria, mountains, snow and a bathtub.
© Fabio Keck, © Stefan Voitl
“We have never built bivouacs to earn money.”
So says our colleague Ralf Ohnmacht, co-initiator of the expedition to set up the emergency shelter on the Trashi Labtsa Pass. Ralf Ohnmacht develops ingenious energy concepts, which he makes “tangible” through graphic representation. It is his passion to present feasibility studies and complex procedural topics in a simple way. He plans and builds the so-called polybiwaks made of aluminum, which his father developed almost 50 years ago, “on the side”. The bivouacs are now in use all over the world. There are eight of these emergency shelters in the Antarctic and ten in the Alps. The latest bivouac box, which Ralf also helped to build, is located at an altitude of 3,205 meters below Austria’s highest peak.
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