I might not have had the chance to live through side effects like nausea, dizzyness, severe head aches and numbness in extremities but I still have to say when hiking at altitudes over 14,000 feet my brain just does not work right. Combine that with the fact that I had been camping with a group of friends for four days and we had become close enough to not be afraid to share, perhaps to much with each other.
Yes this blog post is going to be mainly about bodily functions. ( Or how the body does not function correctly at 14,500 feet)
The Mt Whitney weekend pretty much revolved around bodily functions.
I went to the Sierra’s last June to climb Mt Whitney with ten friends, some new, some old. Some of us had not hung out in over five years, so it was a very joyous reunion.
Wednesday we all met up at Whitney Portal camp site and we had a hell of a time that evening drinking beers, red wine and fishing at the little lake that sat above our campsite.
The fishing was awesome and the beer was tasty.
We cooked the little trout we caught in garlic butter and lemon and that night we feasted on trout, hot dogs, venison meat loaf and apricot cobbler.
We were so full we didn’t even have room for smores.
This was day one of carbing it up before the next two days of hiking the mountains of the Sierra’s, with the goal being a day ascent of Mt Whitney.
Mt Whitney sits at 14,500 feet and is well known to cause altitude sickness. That is why a lot of people back pack it, and do this hike in two days.
We thought we would bad ass it in one.
We scoffed at altitude sickness.
We would hike the mountain slow, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate and we would be fine.
According to Wikipedia one sign of altitude sickness is excessive flatuation, well in that case I might always be suffering from altitude sickness in fact this might be my excuse any time I’m feeling a little gassy,
“I live at 6,500 feet. I don’t have gas! I have altitude sickness! Don’t judge me! You don’t know!”
We really did take every precaution against altitude sickness; yet it’s amazing how many of us in our group came down with the blue hands and extremities they could not feel when hiking over 14,000 feet.
We actually did not even get a group picture at the top of the mountain, we all felt so bad we just wanted to get off that damn mountain! (And it looked like thunderstorms were rolling in for sure, and we still had a four to six hour hike back to camp)
This was truly an epic day of hiking that I will never forget.
It was totally worth all the bodily malfunctions.
