by Kristin Bjornsen
“I DON’T WANT TO TAKE DIAMOX,” I told my climbing partners before we headed to Peru to climb Huascaràn, the country’s highest peak, at 22,200 feet. Diamox, aka acetazolamide, accelerates your breathing rate and helps prevent or treat altitude sickness.
My declaration was met with silence, then outrage. If I had wanted to ascend the peak naked, using a giant candy cane for an ice ax and a Victoria’s Secret thong as a climbing harness, their reaction couldn’t have been much different. “Why wouldn’t you use Diamox?” they asked incredulously. “It’ll help you acclimatize to the altitude.”
Huascarán National Park (credit: Florian Ederer, Wikipedia)
I felt that for all my 27 years, my body had acclimatized fine on its own. Using a drug prophylactically seemed like cheating, à la steroids. My six partners, however, felt that I was being pigheadedly principled and possibly jeopardizing the success of the team by not using every tool at hand.
Amazingly, the small Diamox pill fomented gallons of bad blood between us. (One partner, even now after the trip, barely speaks to me.) I’m not sure who was right. Is it cheating to use a drug that speeds up acclimatization? What about, on bigger peaks, using supplemental oxygen, fixed lines, and porters to carry everything, including the kitchen sink? What bright line separates clean ascents from sleazy ones?
I won’t pretend to answer that. Mountaineers debate these questions ad nauseam, and the same gray area exists in every sport: baseball, cycling, track and field—you name it. Yet these questions point to a larger trend: a growing mistrust of the body’s ability to adapt. We rely on high-tech bling instead of innate coping mechanisms. Functions the body has performed dandily for thousands of years are outsourced to technology. The question is, As the body becomes obsolete, are we losing these adaptive abilities?
I think I am. A typical Saturday hike: My temperature-controlled car takes me from my temperature-controlled house to the trailhead. I button up my windproof, water-resistant, breathable, zip-pit jacket; throw on my ergonomic, extralightweight backpack with internal CamelBak; and slather on SPF 75 noncomedogenic sunscreen. Our trekking poles click-clacking with an insectlike noise, my friends and I trounce up the trail (itself perfectly groomed except for a few muddy patches, at which spots people have cut to the side of the trail to avoid dirtying their boots). With my friend’s GPS-equipped, e-mail– capable, heart-rate-monitoring cell phone, we could, if so inclined, ascend blindfolded and, at the summit, order a low-fat, gluten-free, one-third pepperoni, one-third veggie, one-third pineapple-but-no-onions pizza to be delivered to the trailhead. All dogs met on the trail are kept docile and perfectly well behaved on leashes, their puppyish exuberance tethered to our yeomanlike trudge. No wonder What happens when technology fails: the GPs goes haywire, the camp stove breaks, and the down jacket falls in the river? the Sherpas in the Himalayas call us “butter people” for the way we melt at the first sign of inclement conditions. We don’t confine our domestication efforts to just ourselves either: a 2007 Science study found that less than 17 percent of the earth’s land remains wild.
And with all that, still, my gear geekiness pales in comparison with that of most outdoorsy people I know. That’s not to say today’s adventure athletes are weaker than those of the wool-and-leather, pre-Gore-Tex days of Edmund Hillary. On the contrary, every day athletes are inventing new and remarkable ways to suffer—everything from climbing El Capitan’s Nose twice in 24 hours, to running 250-mile marathons, to hucking off enormous waterfalls, to someday being the first (toddler/ centenarian/potbellied pig) to ascend Everest (on a unicycle/while talking on an iPhone/ while naked—oh, wait, that last one already happened). Clearly people are as hardcore and masochistic as ever.
But we may be too bionic for our own good. What happens when that technology fails: the GPS goes haywire, the camp stove breaks, and the down jacket falls in the river? Of course, wilderness survival skills—also often forgotten in the high-tech whirligig—come in handy. More than that, the body itself habituates amazingly well. At altitude, red blood cell production and breathing rates amp up, allowing us to survive at Mount Everest’s base camp, for example, with 50 percent less oxygen than at sea level. In the cold, muscles warm the body by shivering, which doubles or triples the basal metabolic rate. In the heat, our million-plus sweat glands can produce 2 to 3 liters of sweat per hour. Without food, the body can often live for two months on fat reserves. Most of these adaptations get more efficient with repeated exposure and practice, although they still require time to kick in and the mental fortitude to grunt it out until they do.
Gary Neptune, a climbing icon in Boulder, Colorado, gave a talk at a winter mountaineering class I took. Some of his advice? This winter, don’t wear gloves when scraping your windshield. On your next hike, don’t GU it, don’t gorp it, don’t eat anything at all and see how you do. Go barefoot for a day. These and other deprivations that take you out of your comfort zone help you trust your body and its ability to deal. Adding credibility to Gary’s words was the slideshow on his technical winter ascent of the Diamond of Longs Peak with only a can of mandarin oranges for sustenance.
While I’m not sure I’m hardcore enough to follow the Neptune Way (I have a fetish for food), I’m trying to mimic it somewhat, especially after the Peru trip. I felt like a princess, with the porters jackknifed under the weight of our gear. The luggage contained essentials like tents and carabiners, but it also contained a glut of coffee filters, spare socks, and novels. Okay, maybe I didn’t feel like a princess—more like a pig.
On one occasion, the porter, Juan, 55, was worried about another porter, Tito, who had stayed back with our teammate, Brad, to show him the trail through thick eucalyptus trees. Juan fretted about where the two of them were. “Do you want to call them on the radio?” we asked in pidgin Spanish. This idea was to fail majestically.
He looked at the contraption suspiciously and then shouted into it as if calling down a long hallway: “Tito! Tito!” No matter how we tried, we couldn’t, with our Spanglish, get him and Tito to work the buttons right. They pushed the talk button when they should have released it, and they released it when they should have pressed it. After several frustrating tries, Juan abandoned the radio in disgust, climbed atop a boulder, and whistled for Tito. An answering whistle came from above. Problem solved. No batteries required.
As for the Diamox? I ended up taking it. Prophylactically. I’ll always wonder if I still would have made the summit without it. But what can I say? Everyone was doing it. And the first pill was free.
