On Everest, there’s always someone older coming up behind you

Back in 2008, Japan’s (then) 75-year-old Yuichiro Miura was about to set the record for being the oldest person to climb Mount Everest—until Nepal’s 76-year-old Min Bahadur Sherchan beat him out, getting there one day ahead of him.

There was no trash talking (so far as we know), but we’ll bet a steely glance was exchanged as they passed each other on the South Col.

That tough break for Miura was followed by four heart surgeries over the past five years, the latest in January. In between coronary interventions, he fractured his pelvis and left thigh bone in a 2009 skiing accident. But when a man decides he wants to be the oldest person to climb the tallest mountain, all of that misfortune isn’t enough to stop him. And yesterday, at the age of 80, Miura finally broke Sherchan’s record.

This is extraordinary, but Miura might not have long to savor his golden moment. Because on Everest, everything that’s oldest becomes young again: next week, Sherchan—who’s now 81—plans to take another run at the top. And recapture the record. And, if it doesn’t have to be amputated, put his frost-bitten finger in Miura’s eye.

Miura is putting the best face on this. Whatever. He’s cool. For now he’s the record-holder (and Sherchan is sand-bagging, talking about his digestive problems). He’s even talking about his next challenge, which will be skiing down the world’s sixth highest mountain, Cho Oyu, when he’s 85. But when he gets to the summit and readies himself to crank those first hard turns down from 26,900 feet, you know he’ll be checking to see if Sherchan is hiking up in his tracks.

Photo: Nuptse, Mt. Everest and Lohtse in the early morning, by Ralf Kayser (2012), via Wikimedia Commons

It wasn’t that many years ago when AAA had a terrible reputation within the biking community. They were accused of opposing rails-to-trails programs and hogging all the gas tax money for highways (and actively opposing alternative modes of transportation that might alleviate congestion). The best thing people said about them was that they endorsed wide shoulders, which made biking safer.

The long-standing animosity showed signs of mellowing around 2009, when the Oregon and Idaho branch began to offer roadside assistance for bicyclists. (Ironic historical sidebar: In describing the new biker assistance program, one observer noted that AAA was formed around the turn of the last century to give a voice to then-outnumbered motorists, who wanted bikers to share the road with them.)  But the rapprochement was something less than a full-body hug. Articles asking “Why does AAA hate cyclists?” still appeared and the Better World Club—an “environmentally-friendly auto club” that competes with AAA—gleefully pointed out AAA’s attempts to quash bicycle safety programs in California.

Still, it felt like a start. Then last summer AAA’s Washington chapter instituted roadside coverage. And the chapter in Minneapolis just followed, with roadside assistance starting July 1. For now, the service is available “only to bicyclists who have a breakdown on a street” so you are still on your own if you have a flat on one of the city’s many trails. Because if AAA can’t get to you in a tow truck, it can’t get to you.

What’s going on here?  It was speculated that the Oregon/Idaho chapter felt pressured from the Portland –based Better World Club, which offers biker assistance. The Minneapolis branch acknowledged that it was hoping to upgrade its image among younger people. (The branch says only 25 percent of its members are 35 and younger.) And others have characterized AAA’s pro-biker moves as a half-hearted attempt to “greenwash” its otherwise lousy environmental record.

If AAA is trying to greenwash, it has a long way to go. It’s still easy to find biker blogs that despise the organization. (See: AAA Revives Offensive Against Safer D.C. Streets.) But it’s rolling, Bob.

Photo: “Puncture” by Keanu (2007) via Wikimedia Commons

Walk Score has published its list of the Most Bikeable Large U.S. cities, based on a methodology  that includes infrastructure, hills, connectivity and “mode share”—meaning how many fellow bikers are on the road.

No surprises here. You know who wins this: Portland, San Francisco, Denver. But dig a little deeper into the site’s list of over 120 U.S. cities and a perplexing regional pattern emerges. It appears the South has no truck with bicyclists.

The top scorers on the full list (which includes large and smaller metro areas) are scattered over the East (Cambridge, MA, had the highest score), the Midwest (Iowa City, Minneapolis) and the West (Davis, Berkeley, Eugene ). And the bottom of the list is dominated by the South. In fact, with a handful of exceptions, the bottom 30 cities are all southern.

Is this good data? Hard to say. There are few mysterious no-shows on the list. (Where is Baltimore? Schenectady? Jersey City?) And other lists show some variation. (CNN had Austin, TX, on its list of top eight biking cities; Bicycling ranked it 11th; Walk Score ranks poor Austin at a lowly 90th.)

Still, we’re going to go with the preponderance of data. When you have so many cities from one region on the bottom, you should at least think about what it could mean. Also, it gives us a chance to speculate about why the South could be so inhospitable to bikers.

First, to score high on these lists, you need to invest in infrastructure. Second, you need to want to exercise, and Southern states rank high on lists of obesity. (We’re not saying this; the CDC is.)

Third, the weather: no one likes to bike in a sauna. (Although, to be fair, this is a lame excuse: the various lists repeatedly cite Madison, Minneapolis, multiple cities in Arizona and Rochester, NY, which also have bike-unfriendly weather.)

Or maybe it’s another cultural stereotype we’ve missed. Is it because Southern women don’t like to sweat? Is it because Southern men feel less manly in Spandex?

Or maybe it’s just a question of timing. Before anyone in the North gets too sanctimonious, it’s worth remembering that the explosion of bike lanes and general acceptance is new everywhere in the country. (“Across the U.S. bicycle commuting grew 47% between 2000 and 2011,” says Walk Score. And even a supposedly bike-friendly city like New York isn’t completely on board: in the debate over the freshly inaugurated bike-sharing program, some residents compared DOT officials to the Taliban.)

So we’re giving the south a temporary pass. But really, y’all. Time to get on board.

U.S. Park Rangers are trained to work in extreme and dangerous environments, in deserts void of human touch and uncivilized wildernesses, among mindless beasts and insects. So they are prepared—or at least better prepared than most of us—to operate at the fearsome intersection of federal bureaucracy and the oil industry.

A group of retired rangers have formed Park Rangers for our Lands (PROL), an advocacy group “to inform people about the threat National Parks are under from the impacts of oil and gas drilling, and urge the federal government to adopt a more balanced approach to drilling.”

As we noted back in September, “12 U.S. national parks already contain active fossil fuel extraction operations. And the National Park Service has prepared a list of another 30 where drilling is a good possibility.”

For now, the risk for parks seems to be less from in-park drilling and more from the lease of adjoining land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management or private owners. Case in point: in March, one exploration company submitted a request to drill within 100 feet of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (After a public outcry, the proposal was withdrawn.) Another case in point: the Colorado Bureau of Land Management has proposed oil and gas projects, including one that PROL says is one “across the street” from Dinosaur National Monument’s southern entrance and “next to the visitor center.” After public outcry, the leases have been deferred.

National Parks Traveller says that PROL’s leader, Ellis Richard, and a “handful” of former rangers are hoping to make the public aware of what development means—in visual and air pollution—before families start pitching their tents under a cloud of particulates. In some cases, they’re late.  “At Mesa Verde, he notes that the park already is facing severe air-quality issues due to both drilling operations and coal burning power plants in the Southwest.”

PROL’s website also identifies risks to several other national parks, including Arches, Canyonlands and the new Pinnacles (details here).

The rangers aren’t alone in this. The National Parks Conservation Association has issued its own study of fracking and the parks.

Clearly, fracking is a juggernaut. It promises cheap fuel (recent gas price increases notwithstanding), jobs and energy independence. Also, lots more CO₂ in the atmosphere. Because of fracking, we are a nation awash in oil and gas. Much of the extraction is out of sight, in what the NPCA study calls “remote, rural locations inhabited (and visited) by few people.”

Let’s keep it that way.

Photo: Arches National Park, NPS photo by Jacob W. Frank

Cut some other things by 5 percent and you’ll feel the bite, but you’ll survive: Time with loved ones. Time reading. Time outdoors. Your winter fuel consumption. Vacation budget.

But cut some other things by just a tiny 5 percent—like, say, your body temperature or medicine—and you will face serious consequences. This is one reason why the sequestration is so moronic.

The National Park Service, like other government agencies, needs to cut 5 percent from its budget. So the NPS prioritizes. And distributes the responsibilities.

The residents of Cody and Jackson, Wyoming, hold a bake sale to get the road to Yellowstone plowed so the park could open. Mount Rainier will reduce staff, close one visitor’s center, shorten the season at several campgrounds. Other parks make other choices. Fewer jobs, less money generated in surrounding communities, no one is happy, but we muddle along.

But some functions—let’s say, fire-fighting—that don’t lend themselves to prioritization. Because when you pick park A over national forest B, the pain isn’t just a gnat’s-bite of inconvenience or even a nasty welt of disappointment. It’s devastation. It’s obliteration. It’s billions lost and a century of regrowing.

It’s not a hole that you can fill with a bake sale.

Huffington Post points out that “Congress cut the current budgets for the Forest Service and Agriculture Department 5 percent under the mandated spending reductions, then added another 2.5 percent cut for fiscal 2013.”

Because of the cuts, the U.S. Forest Service will hire 500 fewer firefighters this season. Similar reductions will be implemented at other agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service. And less money will go into preventive actions, like prescribed burns. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have “emphasized that states and local communities will be called upon even more to help battle blazes, protect property and be patient if federal crews are occupied elsewhere.”

So yes, they say, we’re aware that the land we’ve acquired is on fire, partly because we can’t afford to manage it to minimize the risk. And the embers are falling on your house. Just do what you can, take a number and be patient. The next available fire-fighter will serve you unless something even bigger pops up. Because we’re saving 5 percent.

Photo: Crater Lake National Park, by Mike Lewelling, winner of 2010 National Park Service Fire and Aviation Photo Contest, Wildland and Prescribed Fire category.

The first image that comes to mind is jacked-up fishermen, swathed in DEET, popping antidepressants and relieving themselves over the gunnels. This may not be accurate, but the study’s authors admit they have no good explanation for how these substances are getting into the water.

Consider carbadox. In the U.S., it’s approved only for use in swine because it’s classified as a genotoxic carcinogen; Canada and the EU have banned it altogether. And yet it appeared in 28 percent of the lakes studied. “The detection of this antibiotic in lakes that are not associated with areas of swine or any livestock production is perplexing. Whether this indicates that carbadox is being used for off-label purposes or if it is transported to lakes through unknown mechanisms is not clear.”

The cocaine is equal puzzling. Previous studies have found the drug with some frequency in lakes and rivers tainted by waste water treatment plants. “However,” the authors note, “no other studies to our knowledge have demonstrated that cocaine is present in ambient lake water not associated with a WWTP effluent source. The detection of cocaine in surface water is also consistent with the reported volume of cocaine that is currently used in the U.S., estimated at 157 tons per annum (UN drug report, 2011) – an amount that is comparable to the annual production of many commonly prescribed pharmaceutical compounds.”

The amounts of each chemical are measured in nanograms per liter (ng/L), or parts per trillion (ppt). This is so minute, it barely qualifies as a trace. One PPT is comparable to a single drop in a swimming pool that is 43 feet deep and as long and wide as a football field. The maximum DEET concentration was 125 ppt; the maximum carbadox concentration was 121 ppt. Max cocaine concentration was 5.3.

The presence and frequency of the chemicals is intriguing, particularly given that several of the lakes were located in the (we have assumed) pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

If you don’t know what to make of this, you are not alone. Thanks to the emergence of amazingly precise analytical tools, we can know that we and our children are exposed to infinitesimal amounts of chemicals, the health and safety impacts of which are unknown and likely to stay that way. As many as 80,000 chemicals are in use “but only 91 are regulated by the Federal Clean Water Act.” There are indications, though, that even at these low levels chemicals are affecting fish, mice and other species.

The FDA is moving on some of the tens of thousands of unregulated chemicals. The agency is slated to begin a review of triclosan, the germ-killing ingredient found in an estimated 75 percent of antibacterial liquid soaps and body washes,” which is suspected of altering thyroid hormones and reproductive hormones.

Meanwhile, triclosan contamination is moving quickly through the environment. The Minnesota study found it in 14 percent of the lakes, with a maximum concentration of 11.8 ppt. This is somewhat surprising, since the chemical “was not detected in an earlier investigation of Minnesota lakes.”

How did the walkabout become benign?

A hundred-and-some years ago, “a long walk” could have meant raw-boned pioneers thrusting themselves into uncharted territory. Predators, starvation and meteorological calamities. Today, it usually means something so safe you could do it on a first date with a stranger you met through Match.com.

You don’t get a rush from hiking, the logic goes. For that little squirt of dopamine, you need speed and vertical and (potentially) neck-snapping acrobatics.

If this were true, it would be a curse for thrill-hungry older people. We are a bit slower and a bit more brittle and, consequently, we shy away from anything that requires mercurial reflexes. But, happily, it is not true.

Hiking can be as slow and painstaking as you want it to be, but it can still be thrilling—and we’re not talking about the thrill of a beautiful sunrise over a mountain lake, though there is that. We mean thrilling in the sense that being in the wilderness can still be challenging, even dangerous. Risky enough to be fun without courting death or big Medicare co-pays.

There are probably some fairly exciting hikes within a day’s drive from wherever you live, but it you want to pick from a bigger palette of adventures, check out Backpacker magazine’s 2008 piece, “America’s 10 Most Dangerous Hikes.” (And don’t miss the description of how it calculates risk, which is both thoughtful and hilarious.) The risks here are real: predators, falls, drowning in rivers and slot canyons, and ridiculous extremes of weather: sudden cold that can lead to hypothermia, whiteouts so dense that a hiker will walk off a cliff.

From that base, you can begin tailoring your search to the kind of risks you prefer. Looking for higher peaks? Test your luck on Mount McKinley. Fancy flirting with wild beasts? Yellowstone has plenty. (Typically, people think of grizzlies, but those are just your headliners. At a presentation last summer, I heard a ranger describe how she woke up in her tent to find a herd of bison milling around her campsite.)

And if you really want to feel your heart in your chest, you could play the odds and take a stroll in New York’s Central Park, or Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Or wander California’s national forests and hope you don’t stumble across a booby-trapped pot plot. (See Outside’s good piece from last year.) All the excitement a soul could ask for, and no back-flips required.

Photo: Little Death Hollow, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah. By Greg Willis via Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a difference between summer peaks and winter peaks.

In winter, you summit quickly because the peaks you reach are typically found at the end of a chairlift. You start the day at sea level in San Francisco, let’s say, and with a little luck and a tailwind you are standing at the top of Heavenly’s Sky Express lift (altitude 10,040 feet) by noon. That’s a lot of altitude in a short time, which is a great way to experience all the nasty symptoms of altitude sickness (i.e., headaches, nausea, shortness of breath, and palpitations).

In summer, you go up under your own power, so you go up slow. But that doesn’t mean you’re protected from mountain sickness. The higher you go, the greater the risk. Above 9,500-10,000 feet, there’s a risk of more severe symptoms, including loss of appetite, sleeplessness, vomiting, pulmonary edema and cerebral edema.

As we noted earlier, age seems to make it less likely that you’ll suffer from altitude sickness. But no one is immune.

You can take drugs to counter the effects, including Diamox,Viagra and Cialis. But the best way to avoid altitude sickness is to avoid altitude.

You have plenty of options in winter. Whistler-Blackcomb tops out at 7500 feet; Alyeska never gets above 4000. Mt. Hood, Killington.  And it gets even better in summer. You can stay reasonably close to sea level and still enjoy excellent trails and glorious vistas. Lonely Planet’s list of multi-day low-altitude treks is a good place to start, but it’s easy to add your own ideas. The highest point in the Appalachian Trail is just 6,643 feet; you can travel the length of the Superior Hiking Trail and never get over 1,800 feet.

There will still be headaches, but they’ll come from broken straps, forgotten gear and leaking boots. The day-to-day of being on trail. Still not fun, but preferable to mountain sickness.

Photo: Subadult Kea (Nestor notabilis) on MacKinnon Pass (Milford Track) overlooking Fjordland in New Zealand, by Michael Harsch, Harschism, via Wikimedia Commons.

Welcome, new 50-year-olds.

You are an illustrious group, counting among your number a trio of seminal basketball players (Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley),  a brace of talented directors (Steven Soderbergh and the creepy but often rewarding Quentin Tarantino), the lovely Vanessa Williams and Kathy Ireland, and megastars Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt.

Also: Conan O’Brien, Garry Kasparov, Helen Hunt, Lisa Kudrow, Natalie Merchant and Ukrainian pole-vaulter Sergey Bubka. People we all know.

So. How are you doing? A little shaky? This surprises no one. If there is such a thing as fetal memory or fetal perception, you have every excuse if you’re a bit ill-at-ease. No one says you are. But if you were, it would be wholly understandable, because the world went wobbly while you were gestating.

Consider this: You were probably conceived in 1962, a year when the United States was in a benign and enviable stupor—a nation that was comfortable, optimistic, and well-ordered. It is possible to imagine your personal miracle of life commencing while Stranger on the Shore (the top song of 1962) played in the background. But then, as those embryo cells slowly divided, the country did likewise. Where there had been an apparent whole, rifts appeared between black and white, young and old, male and female.

If your parents were paying attention, they probably worried about bringing a child into a world that had come off the rails. Nineteen-sixty-three was a year of assassinations (John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers) and dislocations. When your sweet baby eyes could finally focus, they stared up at Mom and Dad and then—we imagine—pretty quickly made their first drift toward the television. On that flickering black-and-white screen—the first of a life dominated by screens—your first image might have been Gov. George Wallace standing in the door of the University of Alabama. Or, if you were lucky, Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaiming that he had a dream.

In that innocent time people still talked to each other, so as you lay in your bassinette on the living room carpet, Mom and friends might have discussed Betty Friedan’s new The Feminine Mystique, or the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that state-mandated Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional. Edgy back-and-forth among the neighbor ladies, fueled by Pall Malls and Folgers.

Granted, you were probably oblivious to the particulars, but babies and toddlers can read the room. They know when there’s a weird crackling energy around them and they incorporate it into their world view. And those formative childhood years—from birth through 1976, the year you turned 13—were dominated by struggle: civil rights, women’s rights and Vietnam. And it showed up in the living room every evening. (This was a time when war was reported on the nightly news, which people watched.)

(Interesting side note: your formative years coincided perfectly with the formative years of video recording. In 1963, the hilariously named Nottingham Electronic Valve Company introduced the first home video recorder; in 1976, JVC launched the first VHS cassette recorder in Japan.)

Let’s assume your middle-school self didn’t retreat into a fetal ball—and why would it, if your actual gestation wasn’t the picnic it’s supposed to be—and at 13 you had your first kiss. Possibly in a basement rec room. Or in the living room of that house where the latch-key kids lived, because the working mom was a newer phenomenon in 1976 and the idea that kids could be trusted alone at home at 13 seemed somehow plausible. You could have been making out to the radio while it was playing the fourth most popular song of that year, December, 1963 (Oh What A Night!), by The Four Seasons, which could have been the month you were born. So, see, it’s no accident that you’re a narcissist. You’ve been groomed.

You turned into a sullen 16-year-old in 1979. Good timing: that year Sony introduced the Walkman, which made it possible to slap on a pair of headphones and immerse yourself in a cocoon of head-banging angst and insecurity. (The year’s top song: The Knack’s My Sharona.) Because you were in your own little world, you probably paid scant attention to the 90 U.S. citizens who were taken hostage in Tehran.

That event rattled the world, but not in the immediate and practical way of the year’s other earth-shaking upheaval, which was that you finally got your driver’s license. From afar, driving looked like freedom. Liberation. Opportunities for making bad choices. Up close, it meant telling your friends they couldn’t smoke in the back seat, and buying gas, and the occasional movie date.

Sadly, 1979 was not a great year for date movies. The top movie (Kramer vs. Kramer) was about failed love and divorce. The movie that would have sounded most awesome was Apocalypse Now, but it was R-rated. So you went to the first Star Trek movie or Rocky II, which was a placeholder between Rocky and the appearance of Mr. T in Rocky III.

And now you are 50:

• You are accustomed to convenience: your world has always had push-button telephones, freeze-dried coffee and ChipsAhoy! cookies.

• James Bond movies have always existed and General Hospital has always been on TV.

• There have always been 5-digit Zip Codes.

• Boeing 727s have been in service since your birth.

• Dr. Who has always been a thing.

• Women have been flying space missions since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova took off on June 16th, 1963, and spent three days in orbit.

• Alcatraz has never been a functioning prison.

• Beatles music has always been available; legal Cuban cigars have never been available. (Over your entire life, the U.S. has had a travel and commercial boycott against Cuba. To be perfectly accurate, the ban on trade with Cuba dates to 1962, so it actually predates your birth. We just figured there would be a pretty big inventory of cigars on hand, so the embargo wouldn’t start to pinch until ’63.)

• The smiley face…well, let’s say the modern smiley face…was created the year you were born.

• Silvia Plath has always been dead. Ditto for Patsy Cline (March 5, 1963) and Edith Piaf (October 11). If it seems interesting that Patsy Cline and Edith Piaf died the same year, get this: On November 22, 1963, the souls of C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy all left this earth, unless they were immediately recycled into the bodies of children born that day. Which might be one of you, new 50-year-olds.

* (We freely acknowledge our debt to the Beloit College Mindset List, which profiles 18-year-olds as they start college.)

Photo: Birthday Cake (2011) by Vikas Bhardwaj via Wikimedia Commons.

Normally, a bucket list is litany of things you want to see or experiences you want to have before you are no longer of this earth. Or, more precisely, before you are too much of this earth.

Now the Weather Channel has given us a list of things you want to see before they die. Places that will disappear, or at least change so much that their wonder will be lost. Did you know that the Taj Mahal could be shut down in five years, due to air pollution and grubby-handed tourists? Or that Glacier National Park might be devoid of glaciers in just twenty years? (A century ago, it had 150 glaciers; now it has 27.)

The list is a chilling reminder that even the most monumental, iconic phenomena—the forests of Madagascar or, for cripe’s sake, the snow fields of the Alps—can also be fragile, especially in the face of climate change, deforestation, and tourists. That’s not a political statement; that’s simple fact.

We held out a little hope when we thought the list came from the Weather Channel because sometimes they are a titch wide of the mark. The predicted 16 inches of snow can mysteriously turn into a dusting…so maybe Venice might last longer than another 70 years.  Then we saw that the list originated with TripInsurance.com. This is depressing because the actuaries know, man. Things come and go, and the actuaries know when.

The upshot: you’re in a race against two clocks. Your demise and the demise of the world. With luck, the first one will run out long before the second.

Photo: the Taj Mahal, by Amal Mongia, via Wikimedia Commons. Photographers note: “January 06-early morning – taken with Lubitel – expired Ektachrome slide film expired – cross processed. It is NOT photoshopped.”