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Traveling in Bear Country

Late season storms aside, I’ve been looking forward to ditching the ski gear and switching to hiking and climbing.

After all, summer camping in the Sierra is easier in almost every respect than winter. There is one big difference, however: in summer, we share the mountains with bears (more…)

Posted in Camping, Health, Hiking, Tips | 1 Comment

Female Athletes and ACL Tears

The New York Times is running an article on the epidemic of ACL tears and other injuries in U.S. female athletes.

Female participation in sports in this country is exploding, credited in part to a 1972 law, TITLE X, which mandated equal opportunity in sports to female athletes.

As more and more girls and young women compete in sports, it would be natural to expect to see more female sports injuries. But, as the article points out, female athletes may be uniquely vulnerable to sports injuries. As they hit puberty, physical changes, including the structural design of the body and hormonal differences, take place in women’s bodies (more…)

Posted in Health, Science | 0 Comments

Backcountry.com on Plastic Toxicity

This month’s Backcountry.com newsletter features an article on plastic water bottle concerns and alternatives.

Some of you may be aware that Canada’s largest outdoor retailer recently pulled polycarbonate (Lexan) water bottles from its shelves, citing safety concerns about the ingredient BPA, which leeches from polycarbonate plastics, and which acts like a hormone when ingested by lab animals.

The plastic industry (and of course Nalgene) insist that BPA-leeching is not a health concern, and they’ve got some substantial evidence to support their case, including current statements by a variety of health organizations.

Coincidentally, I’ve been putting together a section on hydration product reviews for SierraDescents, including my take on the subject of toxic exposure. That should be coming within a week or so. For now, check out the Backcountry article. Unfortunately, I think the waters are going to remain muddy on this subject for a while.

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How Toxic is Your Sunscreen?

If you’re like me—fair-skinned, that is—you’ve probably discovered that sunscreens don’t all perform the same. I can put on a thick layer of SPF 50 and still get torched. No, it’s not just that sunscreens tend to wash off as you sweat: some just don’t work that well.

Many formulations only give SPF ratings for UVB rays, which turn out to be less damaging than UVA. Some sunscreens now contain new ingredients designed to filter UVA light. Many of these newer chemicals are not yet approved by the FDA, and are only available in sunscreens sold in Europe.

I switched to a dual UVA-UVB formulation (Neutrogena Ultrasheer) about a year ago, and I immediately noticed a difference. My skin seemed to be getting considerably less sun during extended hiking. That’s the good news.

The bad news is I just checked my sunscreen’s ranking at Skin Deep, a consumer site that provides free information on just about every sunscreen on the market. Unfortunately, while my sunscreen rates highly for dual protection, it also rates high for toxicity.

Yes, it turns out that many of those new chemicals are absorbed through the skin into your body, whereupon they go about doing exactly the sorts of things chemicals love to do: cause trouble.

Skin Deep prefers sunscreens that use physical barriers (nanoscale titantium, for example) for their effectiveness against UVA/UVB rays and reduced toxicity. But wait—Skin Deep also notes that nanoscale technology is itself largely unregulated and untested. Figure this in the ‘unknown risk’ category. Many elements which are ordinarily safe become outrageously toxic in nanoscale states (gold, for example).

So, choose your poison: hormone-damaging chemical compounds, or potentially catastrophic nanoscale particles. Or, put on a hat and a long sleeve shirt and leave the sunscreen at home.

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Backcountry Skiing & Risk

After a long road trip to the San Juans, we’re back in dry SoCal, looking at bare mountains and searching the web for diversions.

Here’s an interesting American Alpine Club Article on Risk. The author argues that climbing and mountaineering accidents have dropped dramatically despite a huge increase in participants.

Mountaineering, of course, is generally considered a high-risk activity (just ask an insurance company!). And the article points out in contrast to recent trends to force mountaineers to pay for their own rescues, or block backcountry activities entirely, mountaineering activity actually accounts for a small percentage of total rescue dollars spent.

The author notes that lost hikers and other recreational activities like hunting and boating account for the bulk of rescue budgets.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that backcountry skiing or winter climbing are ‘safe’. On the other hand, we don’t have much good data about the real risk of mountaineering versus commonplace exposure such as driving in traffic, or bicycling down a neighborhood street. This article, at least, is a start.

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Decisions

I’ve been reading a collection of articles on the SunRockIce website. One that caught my eye is called Decision Making for Wilderness Leaders, by Ian McCammon, of the National Outdoor Leadership School.

It’s probably no secret that the avalanche education industry has undergone a crisis of confidence in recent years. Disturbing studies suggest not only that traditional avalanche courses may be ineffective, but that they may even increase the likelihood a person will expose themself to risk.

McCammon’s article examines three ways we make decisions, and assesses them from the point of view of preventing avalanche fatalities.

The first method is called Analytic Decision Making. This is the process most often taught in avy courses, emphasizing the collection of data, using that data to compare alternatives, and then choosing a course of action.

We would expect Analytic Decision Making to be the most rational and therefore the most effective of the three methods. Surprise: in the topsy-turvey world of avalanches and mountaineering, the Analytic method is the least effective, particularly for novices.

To understand why, we need only look at the first step of the process: gathering data. This works well in situations where it is possible to collect and accurately assess all relevant data.

In the mountains, however, data is often incomplete and ambiguous. Additionally, it takes valuable time (itself a safety consideration) to collect the data. The likely result of trying to make an analysis of incomplete (or misleading) data is a bad decision, or the inability to even reach a decision.

The second mode is labeled Heuristic Decision Making. Mountaineers are probably familiar with the term Heuristic Trap, which refers to our tendency to apply rules of thumb inappropriately when making critical decisions.

Heuristics, however, can also be useful in the backcountry, provided those rules of thumb are appropriate to the situation. For example, a heuristic rule might be to avoid slopes steeper than 30 degrees whenever the avalanche danger is rated (by a professional forecast) considerable or higher.

Here, choice has been removed from the system in favor of a simple rule. For novices, this can be advantageous, provided the rule is adhered to—and provided the rule is appropriate to the context.

The last and most interesting method is called Expert Decision Making, or Recognition-Primed Decision Strategy. In this case, experts employ their extensive catalogue of knowledge to search for pattern matches.

That is, they gather information until they’re able to recognize conditions as something they’ve seen before, at which point they’re able to effectively predict what will happen, and make good choices accordingly.

RPD can be the most effective of the three methods. However, like heuristic decision making, experts can fool themselves into thinking they have expertise about a situation when in fact it is beyond their range of experience: the Expert Trap.

Ultimately, McCammon stresses the complexity of Human decision making processes, and how little we know about it. From these three examples, however, McCammon suggests ways to teach better backcountry decision strategies. If the topic interests you, do give the article a look.

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National Geographic Returns to Chernobyl

We’ll stay a little off topic for the day, I guess. If you’ve found the Ghost Town/Kid of Speed entry on my links page, you may have guessed I’m fascinated with Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

In the April issue, National Geographic Magazine returns to the site of the disaster 20 years later with a compelling look at Chernobyl, past, present, and future.

Much of the region remains contaminated. The molten, highly-radioactive reactor core is currently contained in a leaky, hastily-built “sarcophagus” that is in danger of collapsing from its own weight.

Ukraine (where my father was born) has an 800 million dollar plan to construct a stadium-sized overstructure that will be assembled off site, to escape the intense radiation, and then moved into place over the failing sarcophagus.

It will be the largest movable structure ever built.

Twenty years ago, on April 26, 1986, I was living in Flagstaff, Arizona with my family. I remember Chernobyl well; an April snowstorm that fell over Northern Arizona about a week after the accident was contaminated with isotopes from Chernobyl.

The radiation level was minor, but measurable. Had the snowstorm been a thunderstorm instead (with a higher reach into Chernobyl’s contaminated dust cloud), dangerous levels of radiation could have fallen on Flagstaff.

I took a photo and labeled it, “My first radioactive snowstorm.”

Chernobyl’s human toll has been surprisingly small: an estimated 4000 killed. That is much fewer than expected. What was not expected was the psychological toll—a generation of people who grew up believing themselves doomed, and lived accordingly.

Aside from the ongoing matter of containing its radiation, Chernobyl remains relevant today as debate renews about Nuclear Power. Indeed, many environmentalists are now arguing that Nuclear energy, with all its dangers, is much less hazardous than Global Warming.

They may be right. But Global Warming never gave us any radioactive snowstorms.

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