An Ode to Vehicles Past

Prior to my current academic pursuits, I drove around the West a lot... and with all that driving, it's easy to get attached to the beater cars that transport you to magical places like City of Rocks, Idaho, and all the way up to Leadville, Colorado.  

City of Rocks, right after a windy snow thunderstorm. Subaru, May 2013.

So I give to you a final tribute to the vehicles of my past and the one I currently own...

It all started with the Navy Volvo 240 which was my mom's car before I learned how to drive at 16.

The 'vo at home in its natural habit?  Leadville, 2011

240s are beasts.  I drove this one until the odometer stopped working somewhere around 200K and then drove it some more until the transmission cable broke.  Then I sold it some dude from Southern Colorado who's probably still ripping around in it.  It ferried me safely between Leadville and Frisco, Colorado for the 2011 winter season with little except some all-weather tires and two sandbags in the trunk (for weight over the rear-wheel drive). The fix for the transmission cable was going to be around $1000, and rather than dumping more money into the aging tank, I looked for something with AWD.  I totally regret not keeping it.  That engine ran STRONG.  And, if it fishtailed a little from time to time, it kept me from driving too fast on snow-packed roads and always cranked reliably.  And just look at the classic beauty of that interior!  Camel was never a better upholstery color...

The Volvo was a 1991

The Volvo's final road trip to Moab, UT in Fall 2010

The next vehicle I owned was the first thing I could really sleep in, which was my favorite thing about the Subaru really.  Considering the way we parted ways this year, I can say that it drove well in the snow and was a good beastie until it wasn't.  I dumped a lot of money into it's poorly designed engine when the head gaskets started to leak, but with a 2003 Forester, it was to be expected I guess.  Prior to 2005, Subaru has some shitty mechanical engineers or something... the Forester took me to the Sawtooths for the 2013 rafting season on the day-stretch of the Salmon.  It ran me back and forth to the desert a few times.  I could almost lay flat in it if stretched out diagonally across the back.

My first glimpse of the Sawtooths, road tripping up to Stanley in the Subaru.  Summer 2013.

Right after my folks brought the 'roo to it's new home with me.  It came from Tennessee.

Unfortunately, the Subaru met a terrible end down in Blanding, UT earlier this year.  I blew it's transmission and the engine threw a rod, both of which were far too expensive to consider fixing.

The last ill-fated road trip of the Subaru to Indian Creek / Canyonlands.

It had only 123K on the engine, and I sold to a guy who could do the work on it himself.   I had to leave it in the desert for over a month, which was a real bummer and kinda stressful.  I will never buy another Subaru. 

Waking up to cattle and snow, Stanley, June 2013.  RIP, Subaru.

Which brings me to my current whip, da Toyota Tacoma!  It's a 1996 teal blue Tacoma LX.  I just took my first road trip in it, to Zion National Park.  It has 178K on the engine, but a new clutch and replaced head gaskets.

Hopefully, no last road trips in it for years to come.  It seems to run really strong, and it's the first manual transmission I've owned.  I just bought a nice topper and bike rack for it, and I'll hopefully be building a platform in the back for sleeping and storage soon.  Below, exiting the Subway in Zion after a day of canyoneering.  It hauls stuff pretty well and I like the way it is truly a compact truck with a gas-sipping 4 cylinder engine.

Angel's Landing, first road trip in the Tacoma.

The Inventor of the Gamow Bag

Igor Gamow, with his favorite nordic sweater-cardigan

I got interested in Gamow bags the first time I saw a video of Dr. Luanne Freer using one at her Everest ER base camp clinic in Nepal.  I was sitting in my NOLS W-EMT class in Lander, WY, circa 2009, watching Freer deal with a broken Gamow bag that had exploded when pressurized (but she had two, so it was all right in the end).

Luanne Freer at Everest Base Camp

[By the way, this same video is apparently shown throughout the NOLS curriculum as an example to all the students on what to do in an emergent situation when things aren't going well:  Keep Calm, and get the other Gamow bag.  Actually it was just more like keep calm in general.]

This is a diagram of how the Gamow bag works:  it's essentially an air-tight pressurized chamber.  Chamber sounds so fancy--I'll just call it a bag.  Not much to it really.

I didn't think much about the inventor behind this life-saving device.  After it, it's a pretty simple idea behind this bag:  partial pressure of O2 decreases as people go up really high, and this makes it harder to saturate hemoglobin with O2 molecules.  Increase the air pressure surrounding your lungs, and the partial pressure of O2 increases, you bind O2 with your heme groups, and oxygen delivery to tissues markedly improves... and any pathology that gets better when you descend will get better in the bag.  That includes severe acute mountain sickness (AMS), high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) and high altitude cerebral edema (HACE).

... but I want to take just a minute to focus in on the inventor of the Gamow bag, Igor Gamow, progeny of famed defected Russian physicist George Gamow (who did a lot for the big bang theory). Let us consider the man who gamely stared the gamut of altitude-related medical problems in the face and simply-yet-brilliantly came up with a solution.

The first thing I thought when I saw a picture of old Igor was that he looked a lot like this man, who I'm sure you recognize:

This is actor Jonathan Goldsmith of Vermont, of Dos Equis beer fame, who 
actually might be a serious contender for most interesting man in the world. 

But that's just initial impressions; there's much, much more to Igor Gamow.

The dude had an interesting family.  His dad was a badass physicist, and his mom was a ballet dancer / Russian physicist nicknamed Rho.  The Gamows initially tried to defect from Russia in 1932 by kayaking 155 miles to Turkey across the gnar-gnar Black Sea, but bad weather foiled this plan.  Eventually they came to the U.S. in 1934, and George Gamow taught at George Washington University, UC Berkley, and finally at the University of Colorado starting in 1956.

[George Gamow wrote the popular series "Mr Thompkins" and "One, two, three... infinity" which my pre-physics-major dad read when he was in high school.  The books were really popular in the '60s with nerdy folks.  Just FYI.]

Gamow Physics Tower at CU, named after George

There's a lot more to Igor than just having a cool fam.  Igor was a really stoked kid, and he was stoked about a lot of different things:  at 17 he dropped out of high school and joined the National Ballet Company.  He became a motorcycle courier for CBS News covering the White House in DC.  He worked as a karate instructor, broke horses for money, and returned to academic pursuits at the age of 22, when he began studying biophysics at CU Boulder.  He loved the outdoors.  He did a post-doc at Caltech, and wound up back at CU, doing research on Phycomyces fungi.  In 1968, he became a CU professor in chemical engineering, microbiology, and "creative technology." 

Sometime in the late '80s / early '90s, he patented the Gamow bag after trials in Nepal.  Interestingly enough, the initial Gamow bag idea was first devised as a kind of reverse-altitude tent.  Of course, most people know about altitude tents such as the type that elite runners use to simulate 'sleeping high, training low' for the benefits of increased red blood cells / oxygen carriage.  The idea is to remove air pressure / oxygen content in order for athletes to sleep in a semi-hypoxic state, thus increasing the levels of erythropoietin acting on bone marrow to stimulate red blood cell synthesis.  Here's a photo of what I'm talking about, and a debate in a 2006 article from the NY Times.  

Gamow's idea was to give athletes living at high altitude a chance to train low.  He devised a pressured chamber in which athletes living on mountain tops could train. He called it 'The Bubble' but this bubble burst quickly:  the chamber was bulky, hard to set up, and people understandably got hot while working out inside.  Plus, most athletes living at altitude generally got down from where ever they found themselves in order to train low.  When I was living in Alamosa, Colorado, going to Adams State, most runners talked about how Alamosa wasn't the greatest location for training because of the altitude (7,500ft). [It might have been the spring wind and weather too.]

Anyway, Igor came up with more portable Gamow bag and marketed it to climbers in the 1980s, mostly in Nepal.  The American Alpine Club invited Gamow to give a talk on his product, and he sold it over the phone himself for a few years.  In 1989, he sold rights to Du Pont for manufacture and marketing.

Now you can buy one here from a company called Hyperbaric Technologies Inc. at a price starting at $2,110.00,  but you're going to need a physician prescription first.

Igor is described as a renaissance man in multiple flattering profiles written in the '90s, most of which can be found through his personal website.  In them, descriptions of his innovative BAT (Biological Altitude Testing) laboratory at CU, his inventions, and his trained white Arabian stallion Pegasus are prominently featured.

Pegasus

But unfortunately the most recent story is rather unflattering.  Old Igor's philandering ways with his female students finally got the best of him in 2002.  Unfortunately CU had turned a blind eye for far too long, and Igor finally paid $280,000 in a 2006 lawsuit to one of his former laboratory employees after the plaintiff testified that he raped her on Valentine's Day in 1995.  

Not to dig up old smut, or sully the story of the adventurous mountain-climbing, horseback-riding inventor but articles such as Fear and Groping in Boulder and The Smutty Professor [can we just take a minute to enjoy these creative titles] lay it all out there.  CU finally let Gamow go in 2004, but it wasn't until 2011 that he released this open letter in response to an article by the Daily Camera of Boulder.  In a very convoluted fashion, using a childhood fable, the letter attempts to justify his series of girlfriends who were "part of [his] family unit."

It beats me why things can be as good as they sound sometimes.  Can't a motorcyle-riding, ballet dancer cowboy-inventor be simply the altitude-loving creator of device that has saved many lives in the highest ranges on earth?  Does it have to involve inappropriate relationships with students and years of cover up at the University of Colorado?  I was reminded of reading Walter Issacson's Steve Jobs while I was researching Gamow.  Jobs was brilliant--his biography makes it clear--but he also justified some despicable business practices and destroyed personal relationships while building his iEmpire from scratch.  Maybe, in the same way, Igor Gamow is just another brilliant inventor that has too much of a dark side to let his story be remembered as purely rosy.

Getting Toasty in Antarctica

A perspective on gettin 'toasty' during a winter-over in Antarctica, from the great, late Nicholas Johnson interviewing a co-worker over at bigdeadplace.com:

To be perfectly honest, I became Toasty, and not in a good way. I began to hold semi-decent conversations with the several mannequin heads in my room. I had shaved my eyebrows off. I was drinking liquid morphine with someone named Big Hand George. A pair of panties belonging to my friend’s girlfriend lay under my bed as a reminder to my rusted morals. My plan to disappear from station and live in a snow cave at the end of the winter fell through disastrously; I was found face down in front of the fridge at work clutching a half-eaten five-pound summer sausage. Hypothermia had kicked my ass. The employee who found me helped me to my feet and said, “Bro, you got to go home.” And at that point it became crystal clear: home was no longer Antarctica. 

What exactly is getting toasted / toasty / becoming toast down under?

Toast, adj.
Also toasty. A term used to describe a Polie [South Pole station worker] who has been at the South Pole too long.  Toasty symptoms include forgetfulness, slow or slurred speech, short attention span, staring, lethargic and/or antisocial behavior and self absorption.  Polies are most commonly afflicted during the month of August.

From a 1999 winter-over crew, found at this link

Weird, kinda sounds like med school, except August isn't really peak season for us.

 You can read countless blog accounts with Antarctic winter-over antics from the stations at McMurdo, the Pole, and Palmer all over the internet, so I won't bore you with by trying to recreate these incidents, but some of them are both hilarious and violent and therefore well-worth researching.   By the way, the term "winter over" means a worker who spends the austral summer on the continent, when there's generally no air traffic between the months of mid-February and late August.

On the whole, the consensus is that something funny happens when a small group of people (50 or so) spend a lot of time in twilight (2 months or so) to complete darkness (4 months or so) without being able to come and go as they please.

Mt. Erebus, outside of McMurdo Station, one of the three year-round stations in Antarctica.

 This is exactly what happens every winter in Antarctica, after the bases become sequestered from outside contact due to un-flyable weather. I got kind of interested in how much of this is purely psychological vs. biological after I read Nick Johnson's book "Big Dead Place," which I highly recommend. [It's sort of an Antarctic Fear & Loathing.]

 4 months in the dark with 50 co-workers is kind of a stressful enough situation to find oneself in, but the question is how much do humans really need the sun, warmth, or other people, really?

 Yes, I'm aware of those lights you can put in your house for 'phototherapy' to help with depression, and what's called seasonal affective disorder. I've always wondered if these were the kind of things that were just soothingly recommended by psychiatrists, the same way we tell people to drink green tea to stave off cancer. I think green tea is delicious, and that's why you should drink it, but there's at lot of other factors besides the green tea as to why you get cancer, or why people don't do well while isolated in the dark and when it's -30 F on a warm day.  That being said, phototherapy gets some credit here.  It's not just hippies, depressed housewives, and people practicing 'holistic medicine' that love them some light boxes...

"You know, this light box, sunflower, and cup of green tea really are doing wonders for my soul-crushing depression, Betty.  My psychiatrist says I have seasonal affective disorder."

Gettin' toasty is actually related to polar T3 syndrome, a term first coined in 1986 by Dr. Lester Reed, and it might be the reason for the infamous 'Antarctic Stare' that plagued polar explorers of yore.  Described as a "mild fugue state [also] known as 'long eye'", the Antarctic stare may be accompanied by irritability, depression, social isolation, insomnia, and cognitive impairment.  Collectively all these symptoms are called 'winter-over syndrome.'

A lively bunch:  Part of the crew of the Australasian Antarctic Exploration, 1911-1914

Most of the more recent research has been done by a dude named Larry Palinkas, a medical anthropologist out of University of California San Diego (ironically, a city most synonymous with warmth and sun...)  He collab'd on his publications with an award-winning tango dancer / NASA psychiatrist named Marc Shepanek, who seems to be based out of DC these days.  Their publications are fairly recent:  in 2010, they published the results of a medication / phototherapy vs. placebo / dim light trial that went on during the 2002-2004 seasons in Antarctica.  Their conclusion was that light therapy lead to a significant reduction in thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), increase in T3, and "prevents an increase in anger and depressive symptoms in winter."

What I think is cool is that there's perhaps a two-pronged mechanism that explains polar T3 syndrome.  Your thyroid hormones, T3 (active hormone that acts on cells) and T4 (precursor to T3), work overtime to keep you warm in really cold weather. And Antarctica is really cold, like really really cold in the austral summer.  You use up your circulating T3 and T4, so there is an overall elevation in thyroid releasing hormone (TRH) and thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH).  These have been shown to peak in Antarctica in November and July, with a decrease in March (high summer in Antarctica).  Vitamin D, produced in our skin via a reaction requiring UV light, also plays a role in the action of T3 on cells it seems.  Vitamin D levels have to be high enough for the thyroid hormone receptor response in tissues (and this thyroid hormone receptor is also sensitive to cortisol, so that further complicates the picture...)

Indeed vitamin D is one of those sexy medical topics right now:  low levels of vitamin D appear to be correlated with autoimmune thyroid disease.  And no one's really quite sure how much vitamin D we really need; everyone's arguing about this at the moment.

Anyway, what I'm trying to point out is that there's a mechanism here.

There's still some things from the study that don't make sense to me:  the phototherapy appeared to increase free T3 and decrease TSH independently of T3/T4 supplementation.  That seems a bit strange, because I would expect the greatest benefit from both supplement with T3/T4 and light therapy... but these are questions for those endocrinology lab rats with NIH funding, not procrastinating students.

There was an awfully small sample size (13 people on the T3/T4 + light therapy protocol), and that could be an issue with this particular study.

Another consideration to Palinkas' and Shepanek's study is that they didn't measure the 2002-2004 participants vitamin D3 levels, which would have been nice.  After all, phototherapy was used in conjunction with the T3/T4 supplements did statistically to improve scores on their various psychological tests assessing mood and function.

One possible confounder though:  that light box thing... participants were mislead to believe that different wavelengths of light were being testing in the bright light vs. dim (control) light.  I see how that is plausible, but people could probably generally figure that kind of thing out.  That could perhaps have been a problem with assessing mood / function on patients with the placebo therapy.  Another nice additive that I thought about would be some ultrasound studies of the participants' thyroid glands with some nice data points for before- and after-winter-over.  Or maybe pre- and post-initiation of therapy with this particular study. I really love ultrasound though, so that's just me.

Anyway, consider your light boxes and vitamin D supplements as ya head down for a season on the ice.  I wish I was going with you.  Don't catch that arctic stare, yo.

The infamous Nimrod Expedition, and old Ernest Shackleton in 1907