Daniel E Wolf
West Metro FD checking out the site of yesterday’s grass fire near the water treatment plant here in Roxborough Park.
“The cause appears to be a bird that hit a power line and fell to the ground, catching the grass on fire,” officials said.
Full DP story is here.
Today’s Winston K. Walker (WKW) loop hike via Bear Creek Cutoff from O’Fallon Park: 4 miles, 9K steps, easy peasey.
But now I really need to know: Do you prefer selfies like yesterday – see here. Or wildflowers like today? No skin off my nose either way. But we might as well give y’all what you want. Leave me your preference in the comments, just so we’re sure the reCAPTCHA issue has been resolved. Thanks.
Today’s Little Mountain Park hike from Lair o’the Bear via Bruin Bluff. Nothing special, just 3.5 miles, 8K steps.
Suffragettes unite! The term has nothing to do with suffering but instead derives from the Latin word “suffragium,” meaning the right or privilege to vote.
”Universal suffrage” was a term generally used to support the right to vote for all adults, regardless of race or gender. After 1870, when African American men secured the Federal right to vote with the 15th Amendment, the term “suffrage” became more commonly associated with the woman suffrage movement….
The term “suffragettes” originated in Great Britain to mock women fighting for the right to vote. Women in Britain were struggling for the right to vote at the same time as those in the U.S.. Some women in Britain embraced the term as a way of appropriating it from its pejorative use….
There were also “anti-suffragists” — those who opposed extending voting rights to women. Anti-suffragists were both men and women who put forth arguments against woman suffrage, such as that most women did not want to vote, or women didn’t have the time or the mental capacity to form political opinions, or that women voting would threaten the family institution or womanhood itself….
Ultimately, the pro-woman suffrage forces were successful when Congress passed the woman suffrage amendment on June 4, 1919, extending the vote to women in the U.S. It was ratified on August 18, 1920, becoming the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
It’s astounding to me that 50 years passed between the ratification of the 15th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. I wonder how many years will pass between the election of a black POTUS (2008) and a female one? I guess we’ll see, perhaps as early as November.
“The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.” And you can say you heard it here first, folks.
Although the 19th amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote nationally, as early as 1890 certain states adopted statutes guaranteeing women’s suffrage. Bet you can’t guess which state did so first? Valuable prizes to the one who gets it first. Hint: It’s the most sparsely populated state in the Union other than Alaska. Answer in the comments section.
How to tell if you’re dehydrated.
A quiz.
Gosh I miss old Roadrunner cartoons. You?
“Coyote in midair after stepping off a cliff.”
There’s good and bad news for campers on Rampart Range Road. The good news is that it’s very hard to get lost, unlike the woman in the story below, and here.
A Canadian woman was rescued over the weekend after she got lost in the Colorado mountains for four days as part of a guided spiritual “quest,” according to a local sheriff’s department, which said that participants had been encouraged to fast and discouraged from bringing cellphones.
The woman, Gina Chase, 53, of Victoria, British Columbia, was camping near the San Miguel Mountains of Colorado with 10 others through the Animas Valley Institute, an organization based in Durango, Colo., that emphasizes the spiritual value of being alone in nature, the San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. Around 11 a.m. on Aug. 14, Ms. Chase embarked on a “solo journey” near Lone Cone Peak but was reported missing around 2 p.m. the next day after she did not return to camp, the sheriff’s office said.
On Sunday morning, after a multiday search that included K9 teams, aircraft and drones, Ms. Chase was found “alive and uninjured,” officials said. The sheriff’s office had initially said that she was found on Saturday.
“Ms. Chase was part of a group of campers who, by design, set off alone into the backcountry without their cellphones and then fasting ‘to maximize their experience with nature,’” the authorities said in their post.
“You should always bring technology for communications,” Sheriff Bill Masters said in his office’s Facebook post. “Furthermore you should not starve yourself even if a ‘guide’ service suggests the opposite of these basic safety rules.”
Ms. Chase, who declined to be interviewed on Tuesday, reached out on Wednesday evening to comment about her ordeal.
“I cried and couldn’t accept that this was actually happening,” she said of the first moment she realized that she was lost after taking a short walk away from her camp. “After about five minutes, my brain just clicked and I said to myself, ‘This is survival.’”
Sgt. Lane Masters, who is the son of Sheriff Masters, said in an interview on Wednesday afternoon that Ms. Chase had a phone when she was found, but it was not useful because of a lack of cell-tower coverage. Ms. Chase said she made emergency calls but they failed.
Animas issued a lengthy statement by email on Wednesday where it defended its practices and said that Ms. Chase “was not without food or communication tools,” adding that she had “a fully functional cellphone with satellite capabilities and activated the SOS function when necessary.”
On Facebook, the Animas Valley Institute sought to clarify that it “is not a ‘spiritual camp,’” that “fasting is always optional and health-dependent,” that participants are required to carry a “signaling device” and that the group “will be initiating a thorough review of this incident that will include independent expertise.”
In a statement on its website, Animas thanked emergency groups for helping find Ms. Chase and added that the group “has run backcountry programs in Colorado since 1980 with no serious incidents.”
According to the sheriff’s office, Ms. Chase embarked on her solo journey on Wednesday with a day pack that contained “an emergency blanket, a whistle, a power bar, and some water.”
On the outing, campers used a buddy system to verify that everyone had made it back to their solo campsites. Campers were expected to move rocks around each day to tell others that they had been in the area recently, Sergeant Masters said. Animas called authorities after Ms. Chase’s partner noticed on Thursday that her rock had not moved, he said.
Ms. Chase had left her solo camp intending to be gone for only 10 minutes when she lost her way, and she remained on her own for four days, Sergeant Masters said.
Ms. Chase stayed alive by making a charcoal-and-moss contraption to filter her water, which she told the authorities she had learned from watching wilderness television shows like Naked And Afraid, Sergeant Masters said. She built a makeshift shelter from tree branches and used the direction of the sun to find a trail.
“She did a fantastic job in keeping herself alive and saving herself,” Sergeant Masters said, though he criticized the risk involved in joining such a camp. “She was the victim of really bad, negligent practices.”
Despite a labor-intensive rescue operation, the sheriff’s office said the county is hesitant to charge people or groups for search-and-rescue spending because it may discourage calls for help in the future. Animas defended its safety protocols in the statement issued on Wednesday.
“Participants are always within a safe distance to ensure quick response in case of emergencies,” Animas said in its email on Wednesday.
A “quest,” as Animas calls its overnight journeys, typically costs $1,800 to $3,000, although the description for the specific journey Ms. Chase embarked on is no longer on its website.
“The Animas Quest catalyzes the encounter with soul by temporarily displacing everyday consciousness through five primary means,” the website says, listing solitude, fasting, exposure to nature, ceremonies and “soulcraft.”
In recent years, outdoor therapy has become a popular form of tourism. Some other organizations have even promoted spirituality through drug use, leading to retreats that can cost $5,000 to $10,000 for seven days.
Ms. Chase eventually found a trail that allowed her to navigate her way near where a rescue team was stationed. She recalled the first moment she heard a member of the rescue party.
“I just went down on my hands and knees with such relief,” she said, describing how she bowed with gratitude. “It was such incredibly enormous relief that I didn’t have to do it by myself anymore.”
Rampart Range Road is a straight shot from Hwy. 67 near Sedalia on the north to near Woodland Park on the south. So unless you have a serious orienteering deficit, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find your way out eventually. Further good news is that camping on Rampart Range Road only costs $20 a night, so unless you plan on staying for a couple of months, you’re unlikely to rack up a bill as large as the one Animas Valley Institute participants do.
The bad news? Cell service is still pretty spotty, so it might be good to let someone know where you’re headed before setting out. I’ll be in campsite #16, just in case anyone asks. As for starving yourself, that’s entirely up to you, though I don’t recommend it. I mean, c’mon. I’m all for solitude and exposure to nature. And I’m down with a good old-fashioned ceremony every now and again, But there’s “soulcraft” and then there’s just plain crazy. You can probably make that call.
Let me guess: You’ve probably never heard of the Hayflick limit. No shame in that. I probably wouldn’t either, except for the fact that it was discovered by the father of one of my Hershey classmates, Susan Hayflick. A molecular geneticist in her own right, Susan is currently on the faculty at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU). Her dad Leonard passed away earlier this month, and he was – just no other way to put this – truly immortal in the field of molecular genetics. The times story is here. Susan’s OHSU blurb is here.
Susan’s other claim to fame is that it’s her own embryonic stem cells that serve as a basis for the WI-38 cell line that has been used for decades in making vaccines against, among other things, pneumonia. Talk about a lasting legacy. But more on the details of her dad’s groundbreaking research into cellular aging below.
Like many great scientific findings, Dr. Hayflick’s came somewhat by accident. As a young scientist in the early 1960s at the Wistar Institute, a research organization at the University of Pennsylvania, he was trying to develop healthy embryonic cell lines in order to study whether viruses can cause certain types of cancer.
He and a colleague, Paul Moorhead, soon noticed that somatic — that is, nonreproductive — cells went through a phase of division, splitting between 40 and 60 times, before lapsing into what he called senescence.
As senescent cells accumulate, he posited, the body itself begins to age and decline. The only cells that do not go into senescence, he added, are cancer cells.
As a result of this cellular clock, he said, no amount of diet or exercise or genetic tweaking will push the human species past a life span of about 125 years.
This finding, which the Nobel-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet later called the Hayflick limit, ran counter to everything scientists believed about cells and aging — especially the thesis that cells themselves are immortal, and that aging is a result of external causes, like disease, diet and solar radiation.
Other researchers later discovered the mechanisms behind the Hayflick limit: As cells divide, they create copies of DNA strands, but the ends of each copy, called the telomeres, are a bit shorter than the last. Eventually the telomere runs out, and the cell stops dividing.
Dr. Hayflick made other important contributions to science. He developed a particularly vibrant cell line, WI-38, which has been used for decades to make vaccines. He also discovered that so-called walking pneumonia, unlike regular pneumonia, is caused not by a virus but by a type of mycoplasma, the smallest form of free-living organism.
But it was his work on aging that established his legacy. Dr. Hayflick was an outspoken critic of those who thought they could unlock the science of eternal life; he considered that idea an illusion and the pursuit of it a folly, if not outright fraud.
“The invention of ways to increase human longevity is the world’s second-oldest profession, or maybe even the first,” he told the medical journal The Lancet in 2011. “Individuals are going to the bank at this moment with enormous sums of money gained by persuading people that they’ve found either a way to extend your life or to make you immortal.”
So then, there you have it:
There’s no fountain of youth.
125 is humanity’s upper age limit.
And you can say you heard it here first.
Today’s miscellany comes via C.S. Lewis’ 1959 advice to an American schoolgirl on writing prose, and Dr. Freud’s psycho-analysis of an unnamed (but recognizable) golfer.
I suspect had Lewis written after the birth of the World Wide Web, his #1 “Turn off the Radio” would be something more like “Log off the Internet” or maybe “Put Down Your Phone.” As for #7, the one about noise interference using a typewriter, my laptop keyboard is almost as quiet as a pen or a pencil, so, again, maybe that one no longer applies.
But beyond these technological quibbles, the really controversial one is #3, writing for the Ear rather than for the Eye. Though my own jury is still out on that, I will say this much: There are writers who can pen auditorily or visually beautiful prose who can’t write worth a darn, and others who know their way around the details of plot, pacing, and story-telling. As a reader, I’ll take the latter over the former any old day of the week. What do YOU think?
Today’s cartoon juxtaposes two iconic characters who need no intro.
Fore!
Today’s Rampart Range Road hike begins at the trailhead 10 miles west of Sedalia on the road to Deckers. It’s prime camping and dirt bike season right now, so I had plenty of company on the road, though I was the only hiker. I’m providing no pix today, but you can see ones I took last winter here. The only thing of note to mention about the hike today was that it was a bit longer than previous ones because I was scoping out potential camping spots. I turned around at campsite #16 which is four miles in from the trail head. Sorry to report no wolf/coyote sightings this time like I did last May, here. But hey, there’s always next time. Maybe I’ll even throw in a few pix if something noteworthy turns up. One can but hope.
Although my 8+ mile hike today logged nearly 20K steps, a NYT article says that when it comes to the health benefits of steps, it’s not so much a matter of ‘how many,’ but ‘what kind.’ The article is both here, and below. Hike on, friends!
We love counting steps. Maybe it’s because we like goals or else the constant reminder on our wrists of how far we’ve gone and need to go to hit a daily target. Or it could also be that study after study says walking is one of the most attainable ways to increase longevity.
So we ask ourselves: How many steps are enough? Are more steps better? A paper published recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that as few as 2,200 steps could help fight diseases exacerbated by a sedentary lifestyle like heart disease and diabetes, though walking up to 9,000 steps was more effective.
But focusing purely on the number of steps misses the whole picture. Researchers now say that after a certain point, what kind of steps you’re taking is just as important as the amount.
So whether you’re hitting that bare minimum target of 2,200 steps or you’re consistently logging 10,000, here are a few tactics to make more of your daily walk.
The first step for anyone who has fallen out of the habit of walking is to just start, said Amanda Paluch, a kinesiology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Walk around the block or make loops through your house. See if you can walk 2,000 steps, roughly one mile, then increase from there.
If you’re older or have a chronic condition that makes it harder to get up and move, walking at any speed is helpful for your health, she said.
It’s often helpful to count your steps at the beginning, but once you consistently reach about 6,000 or 8,000 per day, start focusing more on pace.
Walking causes your muscles to contract, squeezing blood from your legs to your heart, which over time makes your heart stronger and more efficient. But benefits taper off once your heart gets to a certain “stimulus,” said Keith Baar, a professor of molecular exercise physiology at the University of California, Davis, meaning the same number of steps at the same pace each day.
“To have more of an effect,” he said, “you’re going to need a bigger stimulus.”
Push yourself by walking faster and breathing harder, he said. Building intensity into walking isn’t about burning more calories, it’s about strengthening your cardiovascular system. A 2022 paper in the journal Nature showed that walking faster led to lower rates of sleep apnea, acid reflux, diabetes and hypertension.
Begin by walking faster for 30 seconds or one minute at a time. Increase the frequency and length of those bursts as you are able.
Whether walking outside in itself improves your physical health is still up for debate, according to one 2023 meta-analysis. Dr. Baar, however, argues that we use more energy walking on soft surfaces like sand, gravel or dirt, because our tendons help us walk more efficiently on hard surfaces.
Regardless of whether it’s more difficult, he encourages people to walk on trails because spending time in nature has proven mental health benefits, and because trails tend to have more hills than neighborhood streets.
After speeding up, consider heading up. Finding hills to walk up is a good way to boost your fitness in a world where time is limited, said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine and a volunteer for the American Heart Association.
Most studies, including the recent British one, show diminishing returns on step counts over about five miles. So instead of walking 12,000 or 15,000 steps to push your workout, walk uphill to keep your heart rate up. You can also walk uphill backward to make it even harder and target different muscles. The goal is to incorporate vigorous activity into your walking instead of staying at a moderate pace.
Dr. Paluch suggests the singing test: Go hard enough you can speak short sentences but can’t sing a song.
“If you’re comfortably speaking while doing the activities,” said Dr. Khan, “it’s probably a little too leisurely to count as vigorous activity.”
People often ask Dr. Khan if it’s better to walk or run around a track. While the distance is technically the same, she said your long-term health will benefit more from running.
Consider putting weight in your backpack to boost the intensity of your walk even more. Rucking, as it’s called, helps with strength training while increasing your heart rate, said Dr. Khan.
But Dr. Paluch cautioned anyone interested in rucking to ease into the practice. Weight can cause you to change your gait or how you carry yourself, potentially leading to an injury.
Just as when you started walking faster, begin running for 30 seconds or even a minute, then slowly increase those intervals. And whether or not you decide to run, Dr. Khan said, the best kind of daily steps are the ones you will take while working just a little harder.
Rucking? Jogging? Going uphill backward? NO THANK YOU. Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster. Consider me a simple straighforward hiker, nothing more. And you can quote me on that too.