High Attitude

When I was a kid, a fixture on Saturday afternoon television was ABC’s Wide World of Sports, which dominated the sports anthology broadcasting market from 1961 to 1997. Few TV programs have run longer (Meet the Press, The Tonight Show, Sesame Street, and The Price is Right are among those few). Who can forget “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat!” Back in 1986, I was watching Wide World of Sports one day and they had something called The Upper Yangtze River Expedition on about a rafting trip that started in the glaciers of the Tanggula Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai Province, China. More specifically, that’s the Jari Hill glacier in the Tanggula Mountain range, at an elevation of about 17,526 feet above sea level. The river flows eastward across China for about 3,915 miles, making it the longest river in Asia and the third-longest river in the world. The upper reaches of the river has big rapids, so the expedition was all about the challenges of river rafting at high altitude…all being done by trained mountaineering guys who had lots of skill, fitness and high attitude experience.

Since this was a dangerous expedition, the team took along a rugged doctor and all the necessary medical supplies and equipment to keep the group safe. At 15,000 ft on the second day, a 26-year-old expedition member got a pulmonary embolism from the altitude. The expedition doctor immediately gave him an IV and started treating him as the expedition kept pushing downriver to drop elevation as quickly as possible. They dropped another 2,000 feet within 24 hours, but by then they could not save the man and he died from the embolism. The commentators said that while this was a freak accident, they went on to discuss the extreme and unpredictable nature of altitude and its impact on the human body. The narrative emphasized that altitude sickness can strike somebody one day and not the next, and that people that were very fit could be as affected as people who weren’t very fit, so the bottom line seem to be that everybody needs to pay a lot of attention to altitude and not take it casually.

Ever since that faithful Saturday afternoon with ABC Wide World of Sports, I have often thought about altitude. In the late 1980s when I was traveling to Latin America regularly and going to Chile and doing things like skiing at 14,000 feet and sleeping (I should say, trying to sleep) at 12,000 feet, I would often think about that upper Yangtzes River Expedition. In the early 1990s, I bought my first of five homes in Park City Utah. Those homes ranged in altitude from 8,500 feet down to 7,000 feet and two things I can say for sure are that altitude clearly affects how I and others feel and are able to perform and that a 1,500 foot difference makes a huge difference in things as important as the ability to sleep. I can remember one night in La Parva, Chile at 12,000 feet when I spent a full eight hours thinking for sure that I was going to die and being unable to catch my breath. I survived, but not without a serious altitude scar on my psyche and attitude about altitude. I have also noticed on several more recent trips, including a motorcycle trip to New Mexico, when we spent a few nights at more modest altitudes where there was a difference in how I felt and slept form one night to another, where the only notable difference was the elevation of where we were staying. When I told my friend from college who was a flight surgeon for the Air Force for many years (including a two-year stint as the physician for the Kissinger Commission that traveled all over the high altitude spots in South America) about how I must be particularly altitude-sensitive, he said he didn’t necessarily think that was the case. He said that he thinks altitude is a VERY serious issue and that EVERYONE should pay attention to it. When I told him my Upper Yangtze River story, he said that is the perfect example that even very fit people who acclimate to altitude often can be easily stricken. He considers himself one of the most experienced physicians on the topics of altitude sickness (and traveller’s diarrhea, which really exacerbates altitude illness due to hydration issues) and he said I was right to be extremely cautious. When I go to Denver and Summit County Colorado later this month, this will all be on my mind. I will be reminded about how easy (or not) it is to sleep at 9,000 feet.

So, naturally, yesterday, our friend Chris emailed an enthusiastic suggestion that a gang of us go in February for a motorcycle trip to Ecuador. Despite my pledge to untravel in 2026, I am a moth to the flame and Kim and I decided we needed to look into this because we have loved traveling with the motorcycle band to exotic places. The website for the recommended motorcycle tour company notates on each tour the elevation range of the trip and even has a trip altitude graph. Almost all of their trips stay in the 10,000 – 15,000 foot zone and as beautiful as they look, the altitude charts look scary to me. Because Ecuador’s capital, Quito, is the second highest city in the world after La Paz, and it sits at 10,000 feet, there is almost no way to avoid spending several days on either end of any trip to Ecuador at that elevation. I checked the tours in Peru and they are worse with most of them going through Cusco at 11,500 feet.. Then I checked the tours in Colombia and since they all center around Medellin (a mere 5,000 feet) and take circuits that have most of the trip in the northern Andes at 10,000+ feet, there really is hardly any way to go to these Andean Pact countries and avoid the altitude of the Andes Mountains (that’s practically a “Duh!” Statement).

For years I have wished I could travel to Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. It seems like such a spectacular part of the world. But the Himalayan Mountains have always concerned me as to altitude. Kathmandu may only be 4,300 feet, but Bhutan averages 8,000 feet and Tibet averages over 14,000 feet. Base camp at Mt. Everest is 17,500 feet. I decided long ago that that was just a part of the world I would have to enjoy vicariously or on film. The top 100 mountains of the world are all in the Himalayas. But then, the next highest mountain range in the world is the Andes. Then, after the Alaska Range (think Denali) there are the Caucusus, Kilimanjaro, and Java. We think of the Alps as being craggy high mountains, but they average about 4,000 feet except for Mt. Blanc (15,777 feet) and a few other peaks like the Matterhorn (14,700 feet). In fact, as I stare at the Matterhorn and its well-recognized craggy peak, I am reminded of just how high a trip to 14,700 feet in the Andes really would be.

Am I cathected by altitude? You’re damn right I am, but I do not think that is so for any reason other than personal experience and lots of thought and research about the topic. If you have never had altitude sickness, I would ask if you have ever been seasick. You know that feeling when you would just rather die than carry on living with that feel-bad affliction? Well take that and multiply it by 5 or more and you have a sense of what I think altitude sickness feels like. It’s better than drowning…but not by much. I will be sending this story to my motorcycle pals and trying to avert being called every sissy name they can conjure (I’m sure that has already begun). I do not want to feel that agony of defeat so I feel the need to let my high attitude about altitude be heard.