I will be making a trip to Mt. Everest base camp in October and planning on taking my Sony EX-1 with me. Is there any danger of camera or media failure with the solid state EX-1 at high altitudes? I'll be at 18,000 feet. Can't find anything in the manual or online about this. I'm also trying to figure out how I will offload the footage from the cards considering the very good chance of hard drive failure on my laptop. Anybody done this before?

You're going to be fine. Hard disk enclosures have tiny ports for pressure equalization, so that's not going to be an issue. I'd be more concerned about temperature drops than low pressure conditions. And as long as you're carefully avoiding temperature differentials, and thus condensation, that should be OK as well. In fact, the low humidity environment up there will work in your behalf. Happy shooting and don't forget to share with us.

Oh, and the CMOS sensors are kinda sensitive to cosmic rays; I know, 18k is no 28k, but still something to check while capturing, given the altitude. I believe it's white spots or something similar.

Edit: October seems an interesting time of the year to go there -- early spring trips are far more common.

Nick,
I didn't test it on the Everest and only at 10,000 feet during a snowstorm without any camcorder protection. I had no technical problems with the Ex1.

Only the tiny buttons are not really usable with gloves what can bring you in trouble at arctic temperatures.