Wilderness safety part 2: Staggering down the mountain
The cliché has three words that couldn’t be more false: Ignorance is bliss. Maybe for some. But ignorance can be downright dangerous.
Me on Mount Yale's summit. At the time, I was feeling far from victorious.
On a cold, wind-whipped morning at 14,200 feet, one might believe that the shivers had a lot to do with the temperature. After a less-than-successful summer in terms of training, one might think that the tiredness, side cramps and difficulty in catching my breath had a lot to do with physical fitness.
One small hint ignored, and other clues explained away as relatively harmless, if annoying consequences of circumstances that could easily be overcome. These are the little things that add up. Because the reality of what was going on inside my body was much more serious.
It was late morning on Aug. 31, 2008, and I had just gutted out a difficult summit attempt on Mount Yale in central Colorado. I’d been losing steam on the way up, then started feeling cramps on the right side of my body as I began the most difficult but most enjoyable part of the climb. By the time I reached the top, I was tired. Too tired to enjoy it, too tired to eat. I sat down amongst the rocks and tried to recover from the ascent, snapped a few pictures of friends who had also made the summit and contemplated what I’d do next.
I was dressed for the cold, but it didn’t seem to matter. The longer I sat there, the more I shivered. It was time to go.
Downclimbing is the part of mountaineering I dislike the most. While it doesn’t strain the heart and lungs as much as going up, it’s punishing on the knees and fatiguing to the leg muscles. My knees aren’t the best anymore, so sometimes my descent is a slow, painstaking affair. I let the others know that they should proceed down at their own pace and not worry about me. Everyone knew I was a slow downclimber, and it had never had been a problem before.
What I wasn’t prepared for was my inability to catch my breath. And the side cramp wasn’t going away.
Unknown to me, what was occurring was a combination of problems that fed off each other. The respiratory infection I thought I’d licked was not quite gone, just subdued. The presence of fluid in my lungs, albeit negligible, grew as I ascended. And the presence of more fluid allowed the infection to reassert itself. Dramatically.
By the time I started my descent, fluid was not only inside my right lung (which was filling fast), but also building up outside. Pleurisy, as the condition is called, is what caused the feeling of side cramps.
By now, several things were slowing my descent. I hadn’t eaten (a bad mistake) in some time. My compromised lung was drastically cutting the amount of oxygen getting to the rest of my body. And I couldn’t go very far without being winded. But every time I stopped, the shivers would begin.
This was a troublesome sign. Being this cold was a warning sign of hypothermia, or at least the beginnings of it. Had I been healthy, this wouldn’t be a problem. But a lack of oxygen makes the body more susceptible to cold. And thus my problems began to snowball. I’d stop, shiver, then start again to keep my body warm, only to be forced to stop again.
Clouds, rain and cool temperatures moved in. This is a shot from Yale's summit.
Other complications arose. All around me, storm clouds were brewing. I could see rain beginning to envelop nearby Mount Antero, and clouds obscured neighboring Mount Princeton. All around me, rain seemed to be falling. Still 1,500 feet above treeline, I feared that lengthy exposure to the rain would only make me colder, and I worried about being caught in the open by lightning. At the rate I was descending, I knew I was still a couple of hours away from the relative safety of treeline.
As I weakened, I kept slipping and falling on Yale’s steep, sandy trail. Each stumble seemed to sap me just a little more.
And then came the hallucination.
I’d managed to stagger my way to 13,000 feet when I saw what looked like one of my friends resting against a rock. His backpack was tossed to the side. By now, the whole group I was with was all over the mountain, with some who had turned back long before and others who had summitted and were well past treeline. But here was a straggler, like me, at 13,000 feet. I was coming to grips that I was in trouble, and I needed to let someone know.
As I approached him, I saw that the baseball cap atop his head and the backpack tossed to the side were really just a couple of boulders. My mind was now playing tricks on me.
By now, the hard questions needed to be asked. How bad was it for me right now? Would there be a need to call Search and Rescue? Is there anything I could do to get down faster?
On the summit, I had chosen not to eat, simply because I wasn’t hungry and was quite cold. Hanging out up there and eating just didn’t seem too appealing. On the way down, the deteriorating weather drove me to thinking I needed to get to treeline before stopping to eat. Now, reality dictated that rain or no rain, I had to stop and refuel. Otherwise, I might not get much further down.
Grabbing a handful of trail mix, I tried to choke it down. I nearly threw it right back up, but resisted the urge and kept eating. The energy in those few bites would help me get lower, into thicker air, where I might have a chance at getting myself out of this mess.
The weakness, loss of balance, hallucination, shivering and nausea all pointed to something I’d never experienced before: acute mountain syndrome, also known as altitude sickness. The way out of AMS is to get lower. Which I did.
Slowly, I made it down to treeline. I stopped near another group of hikers. Being near them made me feel safer. I had already gone through most of my water, so one of the hikers offered me some of his. After resting for 30 minutes or so, I decided to get going again, worrying that my group might be concerned about my lateness.
After an hour of hiking in the trees, one of my group, Johnny Hunter, had come up to meet me. We hiked down together to camp. Seeing how knackered I was, the others helped me tear down my tent and even hauled my pack down.
This was a humbling experience. I had organized this trip, offered advice and assumed something of a leadership role. And now I was the last one down the trail, completely spent, having someone else haul my stuff back to the van. I had climbed Mount Yale, but could I look at this as any sort of an accomplishment if I couldn’t even carry down what I’d brought up?
I apologized to my friends, telling them that my poor conditioning got me into trouble up high and that I should never have attempted the summit. No one held it against me.
Trouble was, I still had the mistaken notion that physical fitness was the issue. Within hours, I’d soon realize that it was something else entirely.
TOMORROW, PART 3: THE AFTERMATH OF THE CLIMB. In the hours and days after summitting Mount Yale, my health crashed to potentially life-threatening conditions.
Bob Doucette
bdoucette@opubco.com
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Intense. Makes me wonder about the downclimb on the back face of Rosalie many, many years ago. Above treeline and a cold front comes over the top with cold rain. We considered it “no big deal”. Could have ended quite differently . . .