If you or anyone you know plan to travel to a high altitude, please, please, for your own sake and the sake of your loved ones, check this life-saving link! There’s no way I could stress this more!
http://www.ismmed.org/np_altitude_tutorial.htm
My condolences to Mark Bell in the loss of his nephew. 
I can feel it once I get above 7000 feet. Didn’t really enjoy our trip to Yellowstone 2 years ago due to that. If we had camped at a different campground instead of Fishing Bridge, which is over 7000 feet, and I could have been lower at least during the night, I would have been better but I just felt awful during most of our stay. I don’t ever plan to climb Mt. Everest!
I had a terrible time with altitude sickness on a visit to Colorado and it lingered even after coming down to the reasonable heighth of Denver. It came on after crossing a pass (maybe Monarch?) and coming through that valley where you can see the Collegiate Range…
I will never forget going to Rocky Mountain National Park via Estes Park. Got up to this truly beautiful place and hiked off on my own and puked on a rock!
But it was STILL a beautiful place to be!!
Same here.
High altitudes about do me in. I thought my head was going to explode, last time I spent time in Baguio. One of my parents’ friends has been trying to talk us into coming up to Colorado, this summer, but I just don’t think I could handle it.
I know of a guy who was an extremely strong and active hiker until he ignored the warning signs of altitude sickness while attempting to summit Mt Rainier. Now, he can barely walk from one room of his house to another. Be careful out there.
I worked at the YMCA at Estes when I was in college and it was a beautiful place to spend a summer. Some of the peaks in the area were above 14,000 ft but no one mentioned the possibility of long term effects of going up higher and we usually had short term guests hiking with us. Maybe we were fortunate not to have anyone get really sick. My heart goes out to those who weren’t so lucky…
I didn’t get particularly ill up in the spanish peaks and jemez area in colorado, though I did notic that it is a lot easier to get short of breath.
I think your best bet is to just take your time if you go hiking and rest when you need to.
On a related note, be careful while enjoying the summer sunshine. A 22 year old co-worker was out hiking on a warm day earlier this month and died from heat stroke.
Don’t know the unfortunate circumstances for the co-worker but it never ceases to amaze me how many people I see in the hot sun without so much as a ball cap. I ride my bike in a canyon nearby and it’s all I can do to not yell at them to get a hat, fercrynoutloud. Instantly lowers your head temp by at least 5 degrees if not more. Sometimes they don’t even have sunglasses either. Just weird, in midday heat.[/i]
Thanks, Brassman!
It’s gonna take us all a while to heal up from this one. My son was up at CSU for orientation (where both he and my nephew were going this fall), and it was tough for him.
Altitude is one of those wierd things. Nathan was a healthy, strong, experienced hiker, who lived at altitude (5400 feet) all his life.
Mark
Aaron, I don’t know about the altitude, but my grandma from Poteau used to complain constanty when she came to Colorado about the “Desert Sun.”
I don’t know the details, either; I just heard that he was out hiking with his dad when it happened. My impression was that he wasn’t normally very physically active.
[rant] If you hike in the mountains enough, especially near a large urban center like Seattle, you’ll see people do all kinds of really stupid and possibly life-threatening things (such as attempting a long, strenuous hike without carrying any water). There seems to be a growing attitude of “I’ve still got two bars on my cell phone, so I can’t be in any danger”. Search & Rescue teams stay quite busy around here rescuing people who have wandered off-trail without a map and compass, but with their trusty cell phone. And, quite often, those being rescued aren’t even embarrassed by their own stupidity. [/rant]