My company hired a guy who worked remotely from Leadville, CO during Covid. He was a very, very serious ultra marathoner and he told me there were quite a few very, very serious runners who lived in Leadville for the training opportunities.
I spent a weekend nearly forty years ago in Breckenridge CO, elevation 9728 feet, while working an engineering job. I didn't feel the height at all and drank heavily at the bars with my engineering partner. Next day I drove to Steamboat Springs over higher elevations on a hangover. Steamboat Springs is a piddly 6900 feet but you have to pass Mt. Werner(10,568 feet) to get there.
Regarding climate, I would guess that it is harder to think when it is very cold and when it is hot and humid. I marvel at the idea of William Faulkner writing one of his turgid novels in the Mississippi mix of extreme heat and humidity without air-conditioning.
I grew up on and live on the coast as did my ancestors.
I visited the Himalayas in my mid-20s staying at 3,650 metres/12,000 feet with day trips to 5,000 metres.
I was extremely fit at the time but really hated the altitude. I got light-headed easily and wanted to sleep a lot. The whole experience was a little bit like being on a different planet. My sense of taste weakened and the landscape seemed like it was through a filter.
Humans native to high altitudes really look quite different. Their trunks are very thick to accommodate their larger hearts and lungs and the hip-waist ratio is quite high.
I'm wondering if living at Santa Fe, New Mexico's altitude had something to do with the recent Gene Hackman death.
As far as altitude and cognitive performance, my hot guess is that it confuses cause and effect. Probably more healthy more intelligent people live at higher altitudes.
That would be worthy of a billion-dollar federal grant. Have you ever seen evidence that would back up your thesis? I've been all over and found healthy and intelligent people high and low, also found, more recently in Aspen some of the phoniest, virtue signaling assholes on earth, perhaps that is the outcome of living the high life.
"How come Google Maps doesn’t do topography? I devoted much of my adolescence to getting pretty good at interpreting the difficulty of a proposed hike from topo maps at a glance, something that contemporary online maps seldom allow you to do."
Google Maps does have the "Terrain" layer you can apply. Its useful for day hikes in places like Harper's Ferry, WV and others. But yes, its better to have a USGS topo hard copy, even as a back-up. You grew up out West where the terrain relief can be gradual (Sonoma/Napa) or very stark (Sierra Nevadas). There are companies that specialize in high fidelity digital terrain. My Garmin GPS does enable digital download/display of USGS topo maps, for a price. I always take it along when hiking the Appalachian Trail, along with my phone w/Google Maps, and a hard copy USGS back up if available. Best to have redundancy when off the grid.
When I was a Boy Scout I did the thing where you cut a USGS topo map in 9 pieces and attach it to a sheet so you can fold it up into something you can stick in the top pocket of a Kelty backpack.
Back when I was an intel officer for an Apache helo squadron, I would take the mil grade 1:25000 scale topo maps of our designated training areas, trim them down and paste them back to back, in a left to right (west to east), top to bottom (north to south) booklet for the squadron commander and ops officer; they took them along for use in the cockpit so they didn't have to pull out individual maps on the fly; they seemed to like it. Of course it's all digital now.
Map reading, even reading a street plan, requires a minimal ability to rotate a shape in your head, and contour (topographical) maps introduce a third, vertical, dimension. After taking some thought about shadows I would guess that the two lakes in the photograph are the Hitchcock Lakes on the map, but it needs some cogitation. Contour maps are more easily interpreted when given a bit of shading, noonday light falling on the south slopes.
Bing maps has contour maps of Britain, courtesy of the Ordnance Survey, but not apparently of the Sierras.
Andeans are viewed by nearby lowland Indigenous peoples as Jews were viewed in Europe or overseas Chinese in Asia: clever and tricksy. They certainly had the most imperialist (and obsessively bureaucratic) precolombian empire in the region and now have a thriving merchant bourgeoisie unlike neighboring Indigenous groups. Altitude at the very least seems to have done their brain power no harm.
There are multiple videos out there about their contemporary forms of consumption: “cholets” and expensive fashion
First, I really like these sort of musings/content - the comment on Google not providing topography hit me like a lightning bolt!
Personally, I don't find altitude really affects my thinking or energy although I don't believe I have ever been above 12,000 feet (at least not very long). I live at about 500 feet above sea level but do visit places in the mountain west a few times a year for 5-7 days at a time that are at 8,000 feet or higher. It takes a few days before I stop puffing quickly when doing strenuous things, but overall I feel great - no headaches or lethargy (in fact, I stay pretty busy in both), but I do think alcohol gets to me more. I do have above average VO2 max and lower than average resting heart rate so that probably helps, but basically all my ancestral homelands are sea level or about the same elevation I currently live at so no mountain genes that I know of.
Can't speak for Cusco - my Peruvian travels have been close to the coast, from the Ecuadorean border down to Lima - but on the subject of expatriates, I can now say something informative. By "now" I mean, on a recent revisitation of Costa Rica, I at last found where its resident Americans have gathered; and by "informative" I mean that nowhere else in Latin America have I seen so many billboards in English, or overheard so much English conversation. It is clear to me that gringos who move to this place do not assimilate to it. Nor do they really need to. They may not be filthy rich but I feel certain they are not in any way competing with Costa Ricans for jobs. (I could tell from a Spanish-language billboard that the country does expect immigration status to be regularized - but this was near the border with Nicaragua, whence far more foreigners come.) As for the Americans, they're just hangin', comfortably. Money is obviously not a problem. Whatever they're getting in Costa Rica, they could get in the U.S. Yet here they are.
My totally unconfirmed idea is that their move was fundamentally pessimistic. Fear powered their decisionmaking. They are materially comfortable and yet their home country has let them down, or might let them down, or could or did elect the wrong maximum leader, or something. Better off in this obscure corner of the world. Surely here there is a virtuous and unbreakable simplicity. Oh, by the way, "here" is the Pacific coast. Costa Rica does have mountains but those are not breathtakingly high.
In any case, expats are probably a useless sample or model, at any altitude, for What Serious People Do. They came because other expats came; they stick to themselves. They may be entertaining, but only to the extent their connection to the region is so tenuous. Or bizarre. I recall finding on a Slovene website someone, I think American, pleased to live there, praising especially the government-provided healthcare but a little antsy about proposed cuts to it. The country is beautiful and agreeable but if you are in ex-Yugoslavia mainly because the doctors are free, you probably have nothing to teach the rest of us.
Looking at that map made me nostalgic for real maps, topographic and road maps. I sometimes want to dump all maps from my phones and buy some real ones. Then I can figure out how to get lost on my own, but at least it will be more aesthetically pleasing.
I used to spend my summers climbing in the mountain west. I live at sea level, so acclimatizing was always a challenge, for me at least. A friend would bring his bicycle and happily cycle from Jackson Hole to Driggs, ID the moment we arrived.
I was in good enough shape to solo Grand Teton in a day back then. It was a 14 hour round trip for me. I also summitted Mt Rainier around that time.
Later, in my mid thirties I went to Mexico to climb some of the volcanoes there. I did ok on our acclimitization climbs, up to around 12000 feet, but once we got to 15000, I got a pretty good case of altitude sickness. A doctor who was also there climbing was worried that I was showing symptoms of High Altitude Cerebral Edema, so I got down to sea level asap.
Tolerance for altitude definitely varies among individuals.
As an aside, I was astounded to learn that no woman has ever run a four-minute mile.
My place out West almost entirely up dirt roads from the main road at about 5,000 feet to 8,000. Last summer I was driving back up one day and came across a guy mountain biking up to the same general area. He didn't know I was behind him so I just watched and periodically followed for about 20 minutes. I was really impressed - he looked to be late 30s and never stopped.
During my Teton climb, I met Alex Lowe on the trail. I was about three hours into the approach, hiking uphill and breathing hard. He had started out at dawn, soloed the north face in running shoes, and was on the trail out. He was one of the premier alpinists of his generation. His nickname was “Lungs with Legs.”
He died in a Himalayan avalanche a decade after our encounter.
He was a super nice guy, happy to stop and chat with some nobody he met on the trail.
I never thought about that on airplanes. I resolved to get a lot of writing done on my new iPad that I bought specifically for my recent trip. I ended up, as usual, listening to music almost the entire time and letting my mind wander. BTW- this was on the apple headphones and I was astounded by how well the active noise cancelation works. Press a button and the airplane drone drops into silence...like you didn't even realize how loud it was until it disappeared.
WRT to the survey paper you quote, here's a rule I've adopted after decades of reading the medical literature--don't believe any result that isn't shockingly large. If the paper says the results were mixed and further study is required, assume the result is negative. In general, based on that paper, I'm going to assume that the effect of altitude on people's cognitive function (within reason) is negligible and/or random.
Interesting topic. I attended St. John’s College (two years at Santa Fe, followed by two years at Annapolis). A frequent topic of discussion among Johnnies was the difference (real or perceived) between the intellectual environments on the two campuses. For my part, I wasn’t convinced the two campuses were meaningfully different, intellectually speaking, despite the dramatic differences in physical geography. More mundane considerations like friend groups and the content of each year of the Program had a larger impact on my intellectual experience.
On the other hand, Nietzsche spent summers at Sils Maria and seemed to think the alpine setting was uniquely suited for his philosophical activities.
A final consideration might be Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment. Others will know better than I, but I don’t remember seeing any indication of an altitude-related component in his maps. It is certain that lowlanders (e.g England, the Low Countries) would be well represented in any map of overall human accomplishment. (But perhaps not over represented in a per capita sense?)
Europe doesn't have too much high country compared to the US. Zermatt and Davos are both about a mile high. Grindewald is only 3,400 feet. Hitler's Eagle Nest was 6000 feet.
The Alps peak out a little higher than any mountains in the Lower 48 US, but they tend to be steeper so the villages are at more moderate heights. In the US, for instance, there are no roads over the Sierra Nevada from Tioga Pass to the Lake Isabella route a couple of hundred miles to the south because the Sierra crest is so consistently high.
What's with David Brooks and men's legs? Is it because rightists go for gun shows of both types?
Yet he didn't notice (or didn't comment) that Obama doesn't have calves.
I don't remember anyone complaining about problems skiing at Arapahoe Basin (13k), but we'd saved it for the last day. Our rented van didn't like slopes, period.
My company hired a guy who worked remotely from Leadville, CO during Covid. He was a very, very serious ultra marathoner and he told me there were quite a few very, very serious runners who lived in Leadville for the training opportunities.
I knew a guy from Leadville, CO 40 years ago.
Leadville HS _never_ loses home cross-country matches.
That's what they say but they live in Leadville for the donkey race.
People have longer lifespans at higher altitudes.
I spent a weekend nearly forty years ago in Breckenridge CO, elevation 9728 feet, while working an engineering job. I didn't feel the height at all and drank heavily at the bars with my engineering partner. Next day I drove to Steamboat Springs over higher elevations on a hangover. Steamboat Springs is a piddly 6900 feet but you have to pass Mt. Werner(10,568 feet) to get there.
Regarding climate, I would guess that it is harder to think when it is very cold and when it is hot and humid. I marvel at the idea of William Faulkner writing one of his turgid novels in the Mississippi mix of extreme heat and humidity without air-conditioning.
I grew up on and live on the coast as did my ancestors.
I visited the Himalayas in my mid-20s staying at 3,650 metres/12,000 feet with day trips to 5,000 metres.
I was extremely fit at the time but really hated the altitude. I got light-headed easily and wanted to sleep a lot. The whole experience was a little bit like being on a different planet. My sense of taste weakened and the landscape seemed like it was through a filter.
Humans native to high altitudes really look quite different. Their trunks are very thick to accommodate their larger hearts and lungs and the hip-waist ratio is quite high.
I'm wondering if living at Santa Fe, New Mexico's altitude had something to do with the recent Gene Hackman death.
As far as altitude and cognitive performance, my hot guess is that it confuses cause and effect. Probably more healthy more intelligent people live at higher altitudes.
That would be worthy of a billion-dollar federal grant. Have you ever seen evidence that would back up your thesis? I've been all over and found healthy and intelligent people high and low, also found, more recently in Aspen some of the phoniest, virtue signaling assholes on earth, perhaps that is the outcome of living the high life.
Hackman was 95, right?
You gotta die sometime.
"How come Google Maps doesn’t do topography? I devoted much of my adolescence to getting pretty good at interpreting the difficulty of a proposed hike from topo maps at a glance, something that contemporary online maps seldom allow you to do."
Google Maps does have the "Terrain" layer you can apply. Its useful for day hikes in places like Harper's Ferry, WV and others. But yes, its better to have a USGS topo hard copy, even as a back-up. You grew up out West where the terrain relief can be gradual (Sonoma/Napa) or very stark (Sierra Nevadas). There are companies that specialize in high fidelity digital terrain. My Garmin GPS does enable digital download/display of USGS topo maps, for a price. I always take it along when hiking the Appalachian Trail, along with my phone w/Google Maps, and a hard copy USGS back up if available. Best to have redundancy when off the grid.
When I was a Boy Scout I did the thing where you cut a USGS topo map in 9 pieces and attach it to a sheet so you can fold it up into something you can stick in the top pocket of a Kelty backpack.
That worked well on our 70 mile, 9 day backpacking trip in the High Sierra in 1971.
Back when I was an intel officer for an Apache helo squadron, I would take the mil grade 1:25000 scale topo maps of our designated training areas, trim them down and paste them back to back, in a left to right (west to east), top to bottom (north to south) booklet for the squadron commander and ops officer; they took them along for use in the cockpit so they didn't have to pull out individual maps on the fly; they seemed to like it. Of course it's all digital now.
Map reading, even reading a street plan, requires a minimal ability to rotate a shape in your head, and contour (topographical) maps introduce a third, vertical, dimension. After taking some thought about shadows I would guess that the two lakes in the photograph are the Hitchcock Lakes on the map, but it needs some cogitation. Contour maps are more easily interpreted when given a bit of shading, noonday light falling on the south slopes.
Bing maps has contour maps of Britain, courtesy of the Ordnance Survey, but not apparently of the Sierras.
I read that the Spanish failed to settle the Andean highlands because of the altitude; too high for the women to give birth safely.
I suspect it’ll be the same with Han Chinese in Tibet.
Beijing is using more Sinicized cousins of the Tibetans from the highlands of Yunnan (?) to ethnically tip Tibet toward being more ethnically Han.
Andeans are viewed by nearby lowland Indigenous peoples as Jews were viewed in Europe or overseas Chinese in Asia: clever and tricksy. They certainly had the most imperialist (and obsessively bureaucratic) precolombian empire in the region and now have a thriving merchant bourgeoisie unlike neighboring Indigenous groups. Altitude at the very least seems to have done their brain power no harm.
There are multiple videos out there about their contemporary forms of consumption: “cholets” and expensive fashion
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=34jMO8zclYg
Ethiopians are fast runners when they come down to sea level.
First, I really like these sort of musings/content - the comment on Google not providing topography hit me like a lightning bolt!
Personally, I don't find altitude really affects my thinking or energy although I don't believe I have ever been above 12,000 feet (at least not very long). I live at about 500 feet above sea level but do visit places in the mountain west a few times a year for 5-7 days at a time that are at 8,000 feet or higher. It takes a few days before I stop puffing quickly when doing strenuous things, but overall I feel great - no headaches or lethargy (in fact, I stay pretty busy in both), but I do think alcohol gets to me more. I do have above average VO2 max and lower than average resting heart rate so that probably helps, but basically all my ancestral homelands are sea level or about the same elevation I currently live at so no mountain genes that I know of.
Can't speak for Cusco - my Peruvian travels have been close to the coast, from the Ecuadorean border down to Lima - but on the subject of expatriates, I can now say something informative. By "now" I mean, on a recent revisitation of Costa Rica, I at last found where its resident Americans have gathered; and by "informative" I mean that nowhere else in Latin America have I seen so many billboards in English, or overheard so much English conversation. It is clear to me that gringos who move to this place do not assimilate to it. Nor do they really need to. They may not be filthy rich but I feel certain they are not in any way competing with Costa Ricans for jobs. (I could tell from a Spanish-language billboard that the country does expect immigration status to be regularized - but this was near the border with Nicaragua, whence far more foreigners come.) As for the Americans, they're just hangin', comfortably. Money is obviously not a problem. Whatever they're getting in Costa Rica, they could get in the U.S. Yet here they are.
My totally unconfirmed idea is that their move was fundamentally pessimistic. Fear powered their decisionmaking. They are materially comfortable and yet their home country has let them down, or might let them down, or could or did elect the wrong maximum leader, or something. Better off in this obscure corner of the world. Surely here there is a virtuous and unbreakable simplicity. Oh, by the way, "here" is the Pacific coast. Costa Rica does have mountains but those are not breathtakingly high.
In any case, expats are probably a useless sample or model, at any altitude, for What Serious People Do. They came because other expats came; they stick to themselves. They may be entertaining, but only to the extent their connection to the region is so tenuous. Or bizarre. I recall finding on a Slovene website someone, I think American, pleased to live there, praising especially the government-provided healthcare but a little antsy about proposed cuts to it. The country is beautiful and agreeable but if you are in ex-Yugoslavia mainly because the doctors are free, you probably have nothing to teach the rest of us.
Looking at that map made me nostalgic for real maps, topographic and road maps. I sometimes want to dump all maps from my phones and buy some real ones. Then I can figure out how to get lost on my own, but at least it will be more aesthetically pleasing.
My best map was of Ft Sill in 67. ROTC summer camp. Platoon in the attack.
No matter that we were training for Vietnam in treeless Oklahoma, the map was drawn by Quannah Parker.
I used to spend my summers climbing in the mountain west. I live at sea level, so acclimatizing was always a challenge, for me at least. A friend would bring his bicycle and happily cycle from Jackson Hole to Driggs, ID the moment we arrived.
I was in good enough shape to solo Grand Teton in a day back then. It was a 14 hour round trip for me. I also summitted Mt Rainier around that time.
Later, in my mid thirties I went to Mexico to climb some of the volcanoes there. I did ok on our acclimitization climbs, up to around 12000 feet, but once we got to 15000, I got a pretty good case of altitude sickness. A doctor who was also there climbing was worried that I was showing symptoms of High Altitude Cerebral Edema, so I got down to sea level asap.
Tolerance for altitude definitely varies among individuals.
As an aside, I was astounded to learn that no woman has ever run a four-minute mile.
My place out West almost entirely up dirt roads from the main road at about 5,000 feet to 8,000. Last summer I was driving back up one day and came across a guy mountain biking up to the same general area. He didn't know I was behind him so I just watched and periodically followed for about 20 minutes. I was really impressed - he looked to be late 30s and never stopped.
During my Teton climb, I met Alex Lowe on the trail. I was about three hours into the approach, hiking uphill and breathing hard. He had started out at dawn, soloed the north face in running shoes, and was on the trail out. He was one of the premier alpinists of his generation. His nickname was “Lungs with Legs.”
He died in a Himalayan avalanche a decade after our encounter.
He was a super nice guy, happy to stop and chat with some nobody he met on the trail.
I never thought about that on airplanes. I resolved to get a lot of writing done on my new iPad that I bought specifically for my recent trip. I ended up, as usual, listening to music almost the entire time and letting my mind wander. BTW- this was on the apple headphones and I was astounded by how well the active noise cancelation works. Press a button and the airplane drone drops into silence...like you didn't even realize how loud it was until it disappeared.
WRT to the survey paper you quote, here's a rule I've adopted after decades of reading the medical literature--don't believe any result that isn't shockingly large. If the paper says the results were mixed and further study is required, assume the result is negative. In general, based on that paper, I'm going to assume that the effect of altitude on people's cognitive function (within reason) is negligible and/or random.
My son and his family have lived in Leadville for over 20 years.
I can assure you they are all have very high aptitudes; even my daughter-in-law 😀.
Interesting topic. I attended St. John’s College (two years at Santa Fe, followed by two years at Annapolis). A frequent topic of discussion among Johnnies was the difference (real or perceived) between the intellectual environments on the two campuses. For my part, I wasn’t convinced the two campuses were meaningfully different, intellectually speaking, despite the dramatic differences in physical geography. More mundane considerations like friend groups and the content of each year of the Program had a larger impact on my intellectual experience.
On the other hand, Nietzsche spent summers at Sils Maria and seemed to think the alpine setting was uniquely suited for his philosophical activities.
A final consideration might be Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment. Others will know better than I, but I don’t remember seeing any indication of an altitude-related component in his maps. It is certain that lowlanders (e.g England, the Low Countries) would be well represented in any map of overall human accomplishment. (But perhaps not over represented in a per capita sense?)
Europe doesn't have too much high country compared to the US. Zermatt and Davos are both about a mile high. Grindewald is only 3,400 feet. Hitler's Eagle Nest was 6000 feet.
The Alps peak out a little higher than any mountains in the Lower 48 US, but they tend to be steeper so the villages are at more moderate heights. In the US, for instance, there are no roads over the Sierra Nevada from Tioga Pass to the Lake Isabella route a couple of hundred miles to the south because the Sierra crest is so consistently high.
What's with David Brooks and men's legs? Is it because rightists go for gun shows of both types?
Yet he didn't notice (or didn't comment) that Obama doesn't have calves.
I don't remember anyone complaining about problems skiing at Arapahoe Basin (13k), but we'd saved it for the last day. Our rented van didn't like slopes, period.