Altitude adjustment

8/8/2016

Many “flatlanders”, as mountain-dwelling people call them, find themselves suddenly out of breath and fatigued when they come to hike in the mountains. The cause is the thinner air at higher elevations – and it can be pretty serious if you’re not prepared for it. When I lived in the mountains of Colorado I dealt with many tourists that had gotten altitude sickness after grossly overestimating their abilities. We always said that such people needed an “altitude adjustment”.

I was a little afraid that I would be the one needing an altitude adjustment when I got up this morning. After all, I’ve been living at sea level for almost a year now. Hanging out at a couple thousand feet of elevation is one thing, but going for a strenuous hike at 10,000 feet is totally different. And that’s exactly what I had planned for the morning. I was kind of banking on residual altitude acclimation from my time in Colorado (that’s not at all how things work) and my own personal resolve (may actually be useful).

I packed up my gear in the morning and said goodbye to my biker friend, whose name I still don’t know. It may be Mike. I just think of him as “the nice biker dude with the badass boots”. So here’s a picture of us:

As you can see, he does have badass boots.

Anyways, I headed on to Great Basin and signed up for a cave tour at 2:30PM. That gave me 5.5 hours to get up the mountain, hike around, and get back down. It takes 30 minutes to get up to the trailhead, so effectively I had 4.5 hours to hike. Problem is, there were three trails I wanted to do: the Glacier Trail, the Alpine Lakes Loop, and the Bristlecone Trail. Each was approximately 3 miles long. The ranger at the station told me that I would have to pick one or two and save the rest for later, because the altitude would cause me to hike much slower than I thought. This is the part where I rely on my own personal resolve to overcome any potential effects of high altitude… because I decided to do them all anyways. The good news is that two were tied together so that reduced the hiking distance by a bit.

It was a nice drive up, though pretty hazy from the fires nearby (apparently there are quite a few going right now, so no one knows if the smoke is from California or Nevada or Utah or wherever else). Jane’s power steering pump took exception to my use of it and began to groan as loudly as possible whenever I turned. I mostly ignored it, because traditionally telling it to shut up has not worked.

The trailhead started in a nice alpine forest with a lovely creek running through it.

I decided to go for the alpine lakes first, as I had seen several beautiful pictures featuring them on the internet. Alas, I forgot that drought is a real concern here. So I found the lakes not quite as full as I would have liked to see them. They were actually more like ponds. But that’s okay. Even better than the ponds was my discovery that I can, in fact, still breathe easily at high altitudes. So the other two trails were a go!

From the end of the Alpine Lakes Loop I took the Bristlecone Trail, which winds its way through part of an ancient bristlecone pine forest. These stunted, twisted trees are thousands of years old! Apparently, their slow growth gives them very hard, resilient wood that allows them to persist for much longer than softer-wooded trees.

While hiking that trail I met another solo hiker. We got along quite well so we decided to hike together for the rest of the day. At one point she commented to me that she never talks to other hikers unless she’s alone – and then she talks to everyone. Funny, because that’s exactly what I do too! Must be a need for human contact. Either way, I was very glad to have someone to enjoy the park with, and we had a good time talking about amazing scenery and weird things that we’ve seen in our travels. Plus, she was a nice quick hiker (having just come from Glacier National Park, apparently), so she motivated me to get a move on with my pace.

Eventually the bristlecone forest appeared to be buried in a giant pile of gravel – the start of the Glacier Trail. To give simple context, as glaciers grow and move downhill, they break off and drag pieces of the mountain with them. Then, they melt in unseasonably warm weather (or just during the warm season, depending on the size and location of the glacier), leaving behind giant piles of rubble. And that’s what we got to hike through. Because the Glacier Trail is located at the base of an active glacier, the Park Service didn’t bother to pave it or anything. So we literally hiked up almost two miles of gravel to see the glacier at the top. Unfortunately, it’s the warm season and it’s been unseasonably warm this year… so there was almost no glacier to see! Just some bits of ice scattered about. Bummer.

Are these trees growing in the gravel, or is the gravel flowing around the trees?

Hmm, should be a glacier up here somewhere...

Welp, here it is, the giant glacier! Lol.

Looking back down the gravel trail. Not fun!

My hiking buddy had parked at a different trailhead than I, so we split ways and I got myself back to the visitor center for some lunch prior to the cave tour. While I was hanging out a few people came in all excited about a fire that had started on the next ridge over. Alarm bells started going off in my head – after living in a part of Colorado that got hammered by a couple of really bad fires in a row, I have been very cautious about being near fires. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck down in a cave as a wildfire roared over the hill and consumed everything, up to and including my beloved car. I eyeballed the smoke pretty hard but the employees were confident that the wind would blow it away from us, so I went on ahead with the tour.

While Lehman Caves are not nearly as spectacular as Carlsbad, they do have the distinction of housing a few unique cave structures. The caves are smaller and much more confined, but the formations seem to be older with a lot of stalagmites and stalactites connected to each other. Most notable were the shields, peculiar disk-shaped structures created by some processes still unknown to scientists. Very odd and very cool!

Apparently sometimes pressurized water comes out of the hollow in the middle of the stalagmites/stalactites, causing these weird protrusions to grow in odd directions. Neat!

A shield "growing" out of the floor... but how?

Three more shields. They look like confusing pancakes, or like spaceships.

Upon our reemergence into the outside world, everyone’s first thought was the fire. The plume of smoke had gotten much bigger, so I decided to get the hell outta dodge. Said goodbye to my hiking buddy, promised to send her pictures of the caves, and took off for Utah!

Utah has the nicest state entrance signs

A band of actual wild horses!

My destination was my friends’ house near Cedar City, fortunately only a couple of hours away. It’s funny – though I’ve only met them a couple of times at Knott’s in California for the annual Fabulous Fords Forever show, I still consider them to be good friends. The Mustang community is pretty tight knit and trusting people is easy. I’m just glad that they consider me enough of a non-hooligan to welcome me to their house!

Though I haven’t been on the road that long in comparison to other years, it’s still always a treat to just get to sit on a couch and hang out. So that’s mostly what I did all evening – hung out and talked cars and watched Battlebots. Relaxing! I did take some time out of those extremely important tasks to drain and refill Jane’s coolant, though. I figured that probably the hard, mineral-filled campground water wasn’t doing her any favors. Nothing but the finest coolant and distilled water in there now! Of course, that didn’t make the car run any colder. Didn’t need it to, but I did think I’d see some kind of difference… oh well.

Overall, a pretty straightforward, easy day. I got to do some hiking, I got to hang out with friends, and Jane’s behaving herself. What more could I want? More tomorrow...