Thither & Yon

(I’ve titled blog posts like this before. You have to know by now that I’m being a dork. And just in case any actual researchers are reading this, there are no drug spoilers in this post.)

“Wanna go take drugs and sleep at 14,000 feet?” Dustin asked one afternoon about a month ago.

Because this is the kind of people we are, my immediate reply was not, “Ooooh, what did you score?” but, “Oooh, is someone doing a drug trial?”

For months we’ve been thinking about this year’s strategy for getting out of dodge for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. A couple weeks ago, the perfect solution fell into Dustin’s news feed: the University of Colorado’s Department of Wilderness and Environmental Medicine was soliciting guinea pigs for the trial of a medication to prevent Acute Mountain Sickness.

Free meals, a guided hike to the top of our first 14er, and we get to sleep in the observatory at the top of Mt. Blue Sky? Sign us up, baby. Chances of developing Acute Mountain Sickness along the way? That’ll only happen to the other guys. We’re in!

We’ve hiked higher than 14,000 feet. Y’know, WAY higher. But that means nothing in the world of AMS. Happy and healthy above 18,000 feet? Doesn’t matter at all. A measly 9,000 feet might do us in next time. There’s basically no predicting who will get hit by AMS or at what altitude. Physical fitness, previous exposure to altitude, diet, other medical conditions? None of it has any bearing. Maybe, MAYBE, drinking lots of water can help. (Drinking lots of water is the answer to a lot of life’s problems, actually.)

Only one drug has ever been developed to treat or prevent AMS (Diamox) which is what Dustin took when we hiked in Nepal. I opted not to take it, because the side effects can be just as bad as getting AMS in the first place. If I got sick, I didn’t want to wonder if it was the mountain’s fault or the drug’s. No matter: both Dustin and I managed our entire Himalayan trek without getting sick.

For this week’s adventure, we met in a parking lot in Golden at 6am. No photos were taken at that hour because I’m far too crabby to think of such things. We filled out waivers, had an initial set of vitals taken, and received our first pills. As a double-blind study, neither we nor the researchers knew which drug each of us received.

My plan was to weigh the odds as much in my favor as possible by absolutely drenching myself in water. It worked in the Himalayas, so maybe hyper-hydrating could keep me healthy here, even if I were assigned the placebo or if the drug didn’t work. As a result, I was the last person to board the shuttle, having found myself in sudden need of a toilet just as it was time to get going.

Sorry not sorry.

Our destination was Summit Lake, at 12,800 feet.

We were assured at the beginning that we could hike at whatever pace we felt comfortable, there was no rush, and that the group would keep to the pace of the slowest hiker. I’m accustomed to being the slowest hiker, but in recent years I’ve upped my game, so I figured I stood some kind of chance of not being the pace-setter.

I looked around at our group. Mostly men, mostly in their early to mid 30s, every one of them sporting chiseled calves. Even the outliers had that rugged look that means they eat mountains for breakfast every weekend.

It’s okay. Someone’s got to be last. It’s a service I can provide.

Our group included 18 guinea pigs, three wilderness-emergency-trained MDs, and an ER nurse. Forest Service regulations require that clusters of hikers not be larger than 10, so we split into two (almost appropriate) groups and began the march up. In a matter of minutes, Alpha Squad was out of sight, and so was most of the Beta Squad. The three guinea pigs bringing up the rear (shoutout to Dustin and High School Teacher Kit, who told the best jokes) somehow managed to go off-trail, and had to be rescued by Nurse Julia and Doc Ryan, who had been shepherding the more competent half of Beta Squad.

Once reunited, the newly rebranded Snail Squad continued on, the whole crew now keeping down to my hummingbird pace. I meant to have way more mountain miles under my belt by this point in the summer, but life has not worked out that way, so this was basically my first proper hike of the summer. An H-for-Horrible-grade hike at altitude with zero acclimatization is a rough first major effort. The hummingbird heart was in full overdrive mode.

We caught up with Alpha Squad only one time, at the halfway-ish point pictured above, just as they were finishing their break. That’s them in the near distance, off to smash the rest of the hike. Meanwhile, I was trying to coax my heartrate down from 155, which is higher than I like to let it get at altitude, but I was trying to walk the line between coddling myself and being a total drag. Also, I needed to stop and use a lot of little girl’s rocks along the way (HYDRATE OR DOOM).

“There’d better be something good for lunch,” someone muttered after a particularly grueling bit of uphill. (It wasn’t even me!!)

“There’s a Qdoba at the top,” someone else joked. It’s an old, tired joke, but oh! what I wouldn’t give for more mountaintop taco stands.

The hike we took – officially 2.5 miles, but recorded by my watch at the usual overly generous 3.5 miles – started at that tree icon, climbed the ridge north of Summit Lake, then followed the ridge around until we hit 14,000 feet, at which point we stayed more or less at that elevation below the ridge itself until we got to the parking lot. From there, normal hikers climb up to the actual summit, but we veered off to the observatory.

(I’d have posted the trail map from my recorded hike, but apparently my watch thought I ended the day by falling off a 400-foot cliff.)

Snail Squad did not make it to the observatory before it started to rain. I was sure it would only be light sprinkles, and that we were almost there, so did I take out my raincoat when I had the chance? No, I did not. Did I take out my raincoat a little later when it became obvious that both my assumptions were wrong? No. The sunken cost was strong with me.

By the time the observatory came into view, we were basically socked in and my sweater and pants were soaked. No views, no warmth, no happiness.

The actual observing part of the observatory (aka, the telescope) has been decommissioned, but the building continues to be used as a base for other CU research projects. It has never been plumbed, and these days also does not have any electricity or heating, but at least we were out of the wet and wind. Very sadly for my HYDRATE OR DOOM philosophy, the bathrooms were a solid five minute trek away.

I stayed in my wet hiking pants, figuring that wearing them was the best way to get them dry. Then I had to make another trip to the bathroom in the rain. Faced with the unpleasant task of drying them on my legs again, I gave up and switched into my fuzzy sleeping pants. So warm, so comfy.

Then I had to pee again and it was still raining. (Notice a pattern?)

Back into the damp pants. I was not about to sacrifice the dryness of my fuzzy pants. The hour? 1:30pm. I had a LOT of trips to the bathroom left between me and bed time. I actively avoided thinking about having to make that trip in the middle of the night. I stayed in my damp pants for the rest of the day, which made it really tricky to warm up.

Dustin was not so reluctant to play the pants-changing game. He surrendered to top-tier warming techniques early in the day. He also brought his computer along because HE realized how many hours of the day we would have to kill after a 2.5-mile hike that started at 8am.

Then things started to go sideways.

Half a body in the sleeping bag was no longer doing the trick to keep him warm, and being upright was no longer doing the trick to keep his lightheadedness in check. He took his post-lunch dose of meds (or maybe-meds) and curled up for a nap.

I dried out my pants, drank water, did crossword puzzles, drank water, and walked to the bathroom on repeat for several hours until the crowd downstairs decided it was movie time. Then followed one of my favorite overheard exchanges of the trip:

*thump, thump, bang, thump, muttered curses*

“How many doctors does it take to set up a movie screen?”

“More than we have. We need an engineer!”

*thump, crunch, mutter mutter, thump*

“Okay, this will work. Oh. Umm… I guess if anyone needs medical attention, it will have to wait.”

I peered over the railing and saw they had set the screen up in front of the door to the first aid room.

I also saw that downstairs had turned into a full-blown sleepover. (It was now 3:30pm.)

Almost everyone had bundled up right away, most had taken naps after lunch, and the room definitely had a festive air. Poor Dustin seemed to be the only one suffering so far.

The movie was Meru, a documentary about Conrad Anker, Renan Ozturk, and Jimmy Chin’s astonishing first ascent of that terrifying Himalayan peak. I know the story – these dudes fit squarely into my Everest obsession and I have read a lot about them – but I’ve never watched the movie because, ugh, simulator sickness (reverse motion sickness: if I’m sitting still and the camera is unsteady, I get sick).

I was interested in the movie, but completely uninterested in undoing all the good work my trips to the bathroom had produced, so I settled down in a camp chair way in the back corner, wrapped my legs in my half-inflated sleeping pad (insulating AND waterproof!) and half-watched the movie through the stair rails.

It was kind of like watching Jaws while riding a boat. These men are high-altitude climbers, and a whole lotta things go wrong for them before all is said and done.

The Qdoba dinner delivery came twenty minutes before the end of the movie, with our protagonists poised on the brink of failure, and no one cared because WE REALLY GOT QDOBA FOR DINNER. Summits with road access are amazing things.

I went up to check on Dustin. He wasn’t feeling great, but agreed that he needed to eat something and probably make the bathroom trek. He gamely roused himself and came down to investigate the beautiful buffet, but ultimately couldn’t make himself eat anything. After I finished eating, we made the pilgrimage to the pits through slightly slackened precipitation. I felt like it should be dark by now, but it was hardly past 6pm.

Even my snail pace did not hold Dustin up on the walk back up the hill. By the time we got back inside, he was done for. We called the docs and got him fixed up with some painkillers and tummy-settlers and he answered his final questionnaire and got his final vitals. He had made it through all three doses of the drug/maybe-drug, so we THINK his results can still be considered for the sake of the study, which was a small relief.

By now, one other guinea pig was on supplemental oxygen and I think a couple others had caved to the need for extra medications, but by and large, the group seemed to be quite well off. Aside from over-exerted lungs and not quite enough warmth, I felt pretty good. I watched the clock and made myself some hot tea, the single most delicious beverage I’d ever had.

I gave up trying to stay hydrated around 7pm and gave up trying to keep my pants dry at 8:15 (coincidentally, the official hour of sunset). I made my last trip to the toilets, where a trio of shaggy mountain goats were standing guard, then finally – FINALLY – changed back into my dry, fuzzy pants and crawled into my sleeping bag. After being chilly all day, it was so, so cozy.

I nodded off to the sounds of more mountain-climbing documentaries drifting over the rails. My normal strategy when in a sleeping bag is to take a benadryl in the name of sleeping well, but that was outside study parameters, so I had to hope waking up at 5:30am and climbing a 14er would do the job.

I think sleeping in a bag is an actual skill you can get better at, and that I’ve gotten the hang of it pretty well. It took some time to drift off, and my Sleep ap shows I did a fair amount of tossing and turning, but in the end I got a pretty solid nine hours of sleep and felt a-okay when I woke up. The same could not be said for many other guinea pigs, I think.

Dustin said he was having the best sleep ever until someone woke him up around midnight, thinking he was one of the doctors. He was just drifting back off when another person made the same mistake, and he couldn’t get back to sleep again after that. He was pretty peaky when we rolled out of our sleeping bags.

Ultimately, 40% of the guinea pigs came down with varying degrees of altitude sickness. I did not. Dustin and I have guesses about who was on which kind of pill, but we’ll keep those guesses out of writing.

EVERYONE was happy to have a little sun and a little fresh air in the morning, even if temperatures weren’t very high. A few people took the opportunity to make the hike up to the proper summit, but my angry lungs and I decided to leave well enough alone. An extra hundred feet is not enough to prevent me from claiming I reached the top.

The shuttles came for us at 10am, and I think everyone was happy to begin the journey back to abundant oxygen. As I type this, the second group of guinea pigs will be tucking themselves in to try for a decent night’s sleep. I’m fiendishly curious about how it’s going for them, and about how the study will come out overall. In the meanwhile, I think you’ll be unlikely to catch either of Dustin or me zooming up 9,000 feet in a single day again.

I can’t speak for Dustin, but I’m glad we participated. I was uncomfortable for much of the day, but the hike was stunning, the company entertaining, and the whole experience was interesting from beginning to end. It was an entirely novel thing to do, and novelty is a feeling I really enjoy.

Especially in retrospect, with a climate-controlled bathroom 5 seconds away from where I type.