How to Climb a 14er: Acclimatization
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The same beginning as I have been providing all along through this series: 14ers, particularly in Colorado, are a day hike… well, until they’re not.
One of the ways they can most immediately be “not” a day hike, is due to the elevation. As I state in the video, at 14,000 feet about 0.5% of adults and a full 8% of kids under 16 can experience a serious altitude related illness, like swelling in the lungs or brain.
To combat this risk, we need to both mitigate the risk by knowing how to do the little things that help us acclimatize to high altitude as well as know the symptoms and signs of less severe - but still serious - Acute Mountain Sickness.
This is not one of those things that you can just follow the plan on, and everything will be okay. Also as I stated in the video, science does understand what types of behaviors can increase the risk of getting an altitude ailment, but science does not know why certain people have a difficult time acclimatizing while other, seemingly similar, people acclimatize easily. In other words, we know what you can do to make your personal acclimatization more successful, but we don’t know if your starting point of physiology is helping you or hurting you. Oh, and if that isn’t complicated enough, your body’s response to high altitude can change over time, becoming better or worse at the necessary adaptations.
So, with that amount of uncertainty, I don’t think acclimatization is one of those things we can just do by a checklist. I think it’s important to know what is going on with our bodies so that we can listen to the (sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious) ways in which it is communicating with us. I don’t want to just know what to do, I want to know why I am doing it. That knowledge will allow me the freedom to better optimize my acclimatization in the face of my changing body.
That was the impetus behind the video. I didn’t want to provide just the “top 5 tips,” or promise “do this, and you’ll get to the top.” Because neither of those approaches to preparing your body to go up to places it doesn’t really want to go is sufficient.
I hope you found the science interesting. But more importantly, I hope you found the science to be helpful in understanding the “why” behind the “what to do.” Water is really important. We all get that, right? But how many of us skimp on the water because of the weight? Well, does that weight cost calculation change when the benefit is no longer just feeling thirsty, but is now your ability to help your kidneys do their key job in support of your acclimatization? Maybe not for everyone, but maybe for some.
When we are told what to do, all we can do is follow the directions or choose not to. When we are told why we do something, we can use our own agency to make decisions that are best for us.
To that end, if you want to keep gaining knowledge on the subject, here is the latest - in fact, the 2021 edition - of the collection of what we know about high altitude physiology and medicine. Now, it’s a medical textbook, and priced as such, so you’d have to really want it. But for those who do, you can get Ward, Milledge, and West’s High Altitude Medicine and Physiology, 6th Edition.
For those who care, but not enough to go as deep as the text book, I hope this video helped.