Rocky Mountain High Can Prove Deadly

DENVER — The morning after arriving at a Colorado mountain lodge, Mike Riley developed a piercing headache. He felt nauseous, utterly exhausted, and he hadn’t even strapped on his ski boots.

The 36-year-old New York sales executive chalked it up to the prior night’s celebration kicking off a week in Aspen. But the sickness lingered for two days.

“By then I knew it wasn’t a hangover,” Riley said in a telephone interview. “I knew it was something more.”

Riley learned he was suffering from altitude sickness. As many as one out of four people who visit Colorado to ski or admire the Rocky Mountains fall ill, but few tourists are aware that they face serious health risks by exerting themselves without allowing time to adjust to high altitude.

“I had never been out West or higher than 4,000 or 5,000 feet,” Riley said. “I had never heard of it.”

Medical authorities say more could be done to call attention to altitude sickness, but that’s tricky for the ski industry.

“People walk a fine line between not wanting to scare people away and wanting to educate them,” said Dr. Paul DeChant, who treats about 10 cases of altitude sickness a day at the Breckenridge Medical Center during ski season.

Altitude sickness, also called acute mountain sickness, affects all levels of skiers new to altitude, regardless of their fitness level. It’s caused by rapid ascent to high altitude, where air pressure is lower and oxygen is thinner. The body must work harder to breathe.

People usually begin to feel the effects at 8,000 feet, where the base of many Colorado ski resorts are located. It gets more intense when they climb higher. Vail’s summit, for instance, is more than 11,000 feet, Aspen’s is 12,500 feet and Breckenridge’s, almost 13,000 feet.

About half the skiers affected suffer only moderate to mild symptoms, including difficulty sleeping, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headaches and dehydration. Like Riley, most visitors blame the flu or jet lag and don’t bother to seek medical help.

But some suffer more keenly.

The most severe form of altitude sickness, high-altitude cerebral edema, causes the brain to swell and can lead to seizures and death. The second most severe form is high-altitude pulmonary edema, in which the lungs fill with fluid. The latter often affects young males who try to pack as much skiing and partying as they can into a few days, DeChant said.

Three people have died of altitude sickness in Colorado since 1990, according to the Colorado Department of Health. But doctors agree the number is probably higher because altitude can trigger other ailments, such as a heart attack, which would be considered the cause of death.

“Three sounds low to me,” said Dr. Bruce Honigman, chief of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. “A lot of it goes unrecognized or attributed to cardiac problems.”

Symptoms usually fade within three to five days, after the body has adjusted. But Honigman and other medical authorities agree more could be done to warn visitors about a malady that can be prevented by such simple steps as drinking extra water, avoiding alcohol and relaxing in a place like Denver (altitude 5,200 feet) before heading to the mountains.