Another nasty holiday season on RBT

On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 11:59:05 -0800 (PST), wrote:

On Friday, January 18, 2019 at 5:57:00 PM UTC-8, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:55:35 -0800 (PST), wrote:

On Friday, January 18, 2019 at 4:01:23 PM UTC-8, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 08:02:29 -0800 (PST), wrote:

On Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 5:31:41 PM UTC-8, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:56:04 +0000 (UTC), Ralph Barone
wrote:

jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 1:33:53 PM UTC-8, wrote:
On Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at 8:42:52 PM UTC-8, Ralph Barone wrote:
jbeattie wrote:
On Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at 4:04:05 PM UTC-8, wrote:
On Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at 7:25:47 AM UTC-8, Sir Ridesalot wrote:
On Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at 9:56:58 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at 2:15:27 AM UTC-8, Sir Ridesalot wrote:
On Wednesday, January 16, 2019 at 5:06:44 AM UTC-5, Andre Jute wrote:
Now that was another nasty holiday season on RBT -- and we're no
for'arder than the smug selfsatisfaction of the usual bullies and undesirables.

Andre Jute
Congratulations

So go away already!

Cheers
I'd be willing to bet that I would drop you with one punch. But just
to make sure I'd hit you a half dozen times before you could fall.
Funny thing boxing, the reaction times are built into the muscles and
you have to hold it back rather than concentrate on trying to use it.

I'd REALLY like to see you try!

Cheers

Any time you're in Oakland just let me know.

What is this? The fifth grade?

-- Jay Beattie.


Not even...

I promised myself in grade school to never take any crap off of people
like you. And I never have. And I have always been the one to walk away
from someone laying on the ground. So maybe you think you can change
that record; I'm ready, willing and able.

Fascinating. You sound like all the dopes I see down at criminal call
with oppositional defiant disorder.
https://www.additudemag.com/oppositi...der-in-adults/ You
may live in a **** hole now, but I can guaranty you that going to county
jail on a menacing charge is worse -- or going to prison on Assault 2 if
you actually connect. You meet Ralph on the street, you give him
Christian love, because we all know you are a Christian.

-- Jay Beattie.

I haven't been in a fistfight since elementary school, so I'm quite willing
to concede the title of "Baddest mofo in all of Oakland" to Tom. However, I
thought we weren't supposed to talk about fight club.

For Heaven's sake! Tom is an old man, who is in ill health and suffers
from brain damage. The thought that he is going to beat anyone up is
just another one of his fantasies, like flying around in the bomb bay
of airplanes at 5,000 feet over Vietnam.

And yet that is what happened. But then since you've done so little you wouldn't understand that life is strange and wonderful. The tail gunner in a B52D is actually in the tail. The way to get from the back pressurized compartment to the front is via a very narrow 6" wide shelf. The only way to do this is to put one knee in front of the other and scoot along while holding yourself on the shelf by slipping two fingers per hand between the gap in the vertical and horizontal ribs of the aircraft. On the ground this is scary since you're at least 10' above the bottom of the bomb bays. Because of the curvature of the hull you have to lean your body out over the bays so not many people would do that.

The A/C asked me to go to the gunner's position to find out what the heck was wrong with him since he sounded like he was going nuts. It turned out to be nothing since he was just watching the SAMs bursting around us.

So I went back there before the bomb run and came back after the bomb run. You cannot breath the air above 10,000 feet and remain conscious. So the only way to crawl through an unpressurized bomb bay to the gunner's position using a lot of strength would be to be below 10,000 ft,

After the bomb run I had to come forward because that was the only time we were low enough to allow my passage. What I was unaware of was that they leave the bomb bays open after a run to air then out. If we got shrapnel through the sides of the aircraft and through a bomb it could have splattered explosives into the bomb bays so you aired them out before rising to altitude.

That meant that on my way forward I crawled through the bomb bays with the doors open. The bomb bay doors had three positions - closed, open and unpowered so that they hung below the aircraft but not pushed entirely out to the sides. They depowered the doors and let them hang straight down after the run.

I even flew the aircraft - the A/C had to take a leak and regulations said that inside the war zone you had to have both A/C and Pilot positions manned at all times. So he called me up to the upper deck and put me in the A/C position. He even disengaged the autopilot so that I could fly the aircraft. The Pilot was there to make sure I didn't do anything wrong. But he supervised me as I banked it one way and the other a little. The aircraft is huge and it is extremely stable so it was no big deal.

I was up there for at least 5 minutes. I guess the A/C was BS'ing with the navigator and bombardier.

Yesterday, I was going to look at some building where I used to work and where there might be a new company. So I was going to take a resume. I was looking around for my briefcase and ran across a three clip folder - to my surprise I discovered that I taken a course on navigation from the University of Marin and passed with an A. I remember nothing about that but that is why I was hired on as Navigator for those large racing sailboats down the Pacific Coast to Catalina. I assumed that I had taught navigation to myself and that the reason I was on board is because I was the only one that would climb the mast in case of a problem at the masthead. Try climbing up a 70 ft mast in a seaway and you'd know why no one else would do that. I would be Navigator and Watch Captain.

I raced motorcycles semi-professionally which meant that Kawasaki gave ne an A1R to race but I did everything else myself. When I got tired of racing against a guy 5'1" tall that weight next to nothing on a Yamaha I was the Safety Director of the American Federation of Motorcyclists. I went down to Bell and discussed helmets with them. I learned enough that after bicycle helmets were around for awhile I wrote a paper showing that they don't do much. It's still floating around there out on the web someplace.

Some of the jobs I've done range from designing and programming the machine used to identify HIV for the very first time to programming the poison gas detectors for the Army at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. I even worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories to increase the power on their accelerator.

Between jobs I even helped start a telephone installation company for high rise office buildings in San Francisco.

Because you people have no abilities you assume no one else does. So you cannot believe anything that isn't outside of your very narrow scope of understanding.

I argued economics with Paul Volcker and see the sheer ignorance of Jay and Frank who are both supposedly postgrads.


Tom, you are as full of **** as a Christmas Turkey. You flew the B-52!
On a combat mission they shut off the autopilot and let you fly the
airplane!

SAC regulations say that both the AC and the Pilot positions have to
be filled... Right! So I guess that the only way an AC can take a leak
is to either have Tom aboard or **** his pants?

And, the A.C. asked a non-crew member to crawl back to check on the
tail gunner? Or are you claiming that you were a crew member?

No intercom? The AC couldn't call up the tail gunner and ask him how
he is? You think that whole on oxygen the flight crew isn't constantly
checking each other?

All I can say is that you have a very vivid imagination and know
little if anything about how a USAF flight crew acts in combat.
--

Cheers,

John B.

You really are one stupid **** aren't you? Like flying a B52 is some big deal with the aircraft pilot siting in the right seat. What a dunce.

I have no idea as I was never invited to fly a B-52 but as a crew
chief on a RB-50 I did fly with the aircraft quite a number of times
and the idea that an A.C. is going to let some totally unqualified non
crew member sit in his seat and fly his airplane is as weird as any of
your other fantasies.

I happened to be on the aircraft and was up sitting dead center behind them looking at how the instruments responded. Normally the EWO would have sat in. Well since you said that you were friends with an EWO who had been in a war zone he would have known that and been able to tell you about it. You did say you were friends with an EWO didn't you?

Tom, either you are having some day dream or you are telling lies. A
good friend, was an EWO and strange as it may seem he never mentioned
"sitting in the seat" and given that he received an award for
discovering that because of the sensitivity of some of his gear it was
possible for the EWO to forecast the failure of the A.C. generators on
a B-52 I'd guess that he probably knew what he was talking about.

So you think that you're going to call on the Intercom and ask the tail gunner why he is whooping and screaming huh? I guess that's why no one would ever trust you with a wooden nickel. It's pretty plain that you knew that you couldn't get a job back in the US and that's why you're still in Thailand.


Tom, as I mentioned, I did make quite a number of flights on a RB-50
and yes, the A.C. did call, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that
the crew members did call in on a regular basis to ensure that,
particularly when on oxygen that none of them had problems.

As for a tail gunner whooping and hollering on the intercom I just
don't believe that either. To the Air Force flying an airplane is a
serious job and someone whooping and screaming on the intercom
wouldn't have been tolerated. But I agree that to a civilian it makes
a good story - never been there, never done that.

As for a "job in Thailand" I only worked in Thailand for a short time
before the oil boom in Indonesia when I went to work there where the
money was. Not bad work either, 2 weeks in the jungle and 2 weeks at
home and the money flooding in.

But you wouldn't have qualified. Too much bull ****. See we lived at
pretty close quarters out in the jungle and some loud mouthed fool
just wouldn't be tolerated. The lads would have gone top the Project
Manager and told him "either he goes or we go" and you'd have been on
the next flight out.

So perhaps you can explain to me what in the hell you would ever know about how a flight crew behaves in a combat zone.

Given that I spent about 10 years in two organizations that flew "hot
gun" missions in Asia I suggest that I certainly know more then you
do.

See Tom, that's your problem. You've sat around and told a bunch of
stories to people that didn't know and now you believe them yourself
and when you start to tell your stores to someone that was there and
did it you fall flat on your arse.

Tell me, is this story something that you made up or did you dream it?
--

Cheers,

John B.

If you were a crew chief on a B50 you're one hell of a lot older than you've suggested. You couldn't ride a bike now if it had four wheels and someone was pushing you around in one. Your crap about the Air Force being so ridged also tells me you were never in. I broke orders several times and all I had to do was say "safety of flight" and there was nothing they could get past the base commander.

Sorry to tell you Tom, but I was a crew chief on a RB-50 at Yokota AFB
in 1955, during my first tour in Japan and I'm 86 years old now and I
still ride a bicycle. Granted I don't do many of those 100 mile rides
but a 100 Km ride is still within my capability.

Your rather poor command of English or your increasing dementia apparently keeps you from remembering that we were actually in combat and not like you - ****ing your pants just to fly in that pile of junk which was nothing more than a B29 with bigger engines on it and a bigger tail to offset the increased torque of those engines that had to be rebuilt almost every flight which is why they didn't fly them.

You were actually in combat? You, an airman 3rd class with a 3 level
skill were flying in combat.... You have a very vivid imagination!

What's next? A tale about how you were awarded a medal for your combat
flight?

--

Cheers,

John B.

jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 12:29:11 PM UTC-8, wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 9:46:59 AM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 8:43:46 AM UTC-8, Mark J. wrote:
On 1/18/2019 8:02 AM, wrote:
On Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 5:31:41 PM UTC-8, John B. Slocomb wrote:
For Heaven's sake! Tom is an old man, who is in ill health and suffers
from brain damage. The thought that he is going to beat anyone up is
just another one of his fantasies, like flying around in the bomb bay
of airplanes at 5,000 feet over Vietnam.

And yet that is what happened. But then since you've done so little
you wouldn't understand that life is strange and wonderful. The tail
gunner in a B52D is actually in the tail. The way to get from the
back pressurized compartment to the front is via a very narrow 6"
wide shelf. The only way to do this is to put one knee in front of
the other and scoot along while holding yourself on the shelf by
slipping two fingers per hand between the gap in the vertical and
horizontal ribs of the aircraft. On the ground this is scary since
you're at least 10' above the bottom of the bomb bays. Because of the
curvature of the hull you have to lean your body out over the bays so
not many people would do that.

The A/C asked me to go to the gunner's position to find out what the
heck was wrong with him since he sounded like he was going nuts. It
turned out to be nothing since he was just watching the SAMs bursting around us.

So I went back there before the bomb run and came back after the bomb
run. You cannot breath the air above 10,000 feet and remain conscious.

Funny that I've done it at least six times on a bicycle. Is it when you
don't have a bicycle handy that you lose consciousness?

Riding across the US, I went over Hoosier Pass in Colorado at 11,500
and remained conscious -- and in fact felt pretty peppy. More recently,
however, I almost passed out riding in Utah at 10,715 -- but only
because I was trying to keep up with my son. The grade wasn't that bad
-- just long. https://bbrelje.wordpress.com/2013/0...ghway-cycling/

Time for a ride in the fog!

-- Jay Beattie.

People raised at or near sea level usually have altitude sickness at
10,000 ft or higher. This is medical fact so why are you guys trying to deny it?

Is it your pretense that aircraft are NOT pressurized above 10,000 feet?
Jumping in with both feet with that fool Slocumb?

Altitude sickness is not passing out from lack of O2. It's feeling like
**** and throwing up or almost throwing up. For me, mild SOB is the least
of my problems when it comes to altitude sickness.

I've had mild altitude sickness coming from PDX and skiing at the top of
Snowbird or Alta, which is 11,000. It gets worse with effort/dehydration.
The worst altitude sickness I ever had was doing a speed climb up Mt.
Adams with my wife and some friends.
https://alpenglowsports.files.wordpr...adams-jpeg.jpg I
decided to go full blast up the face below the false summit -- that step
near the top. I about lost my lunch and felt like crap for the last
section up to the real summit. Adams is not that high, so breathing was
never a real issue. BTW, the great part about that climb is you can
glissade down a butt-made bobsled chute much of the way back, braking now
and then with an ice ax to avoid flying out of the chute. I ended up
wearing a hole through my snow pants. I'll go from zero feet to 7,500
tomorrow morning for skiing, and I won't even register the change except
for ear popping -- maybe a little SOB with hard effort, but that
elevation gain doesn't make me sick.

-- Jay Beattie.



When I was a kid I spent a few weeks in Montana. I remember hiking around
Bear Tooth pass outside of Red Lodge. I think it was around 10,000 ft.
Coming from -7 feet in New Orleans I found it took some getting used to. I
wasn’t sick but had less stamina. Awesome place though.

I thought you could breath up to 8000 meters or so without oxygen tanks...

--
duane

On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 14:04:16 -0800 (PST), jbeattie
wrote:

On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 12:29:11 PM UTC-8, wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 9:46:59 AM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 8:43:46 AM UTC-8, Mark J. wrote:
On 1/18/2019 8:02 AM, wrote:
On Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 5:31:41 PM UTC-8, John B. Slocomb wrote:
For Heaven's sake! Tom is an old man, who is in ill health and suffers
from brain damage. The thought that he is going to beat anyone up is
just another one of his fantasies, like flying around in the bomb bay
of airplanes at 5,000 feet over Vietnam.

And yet that is what happened. But then since you've done so little you wouldn't understand that life is strange and wonderful. The tail gunner in a B52D is actually in the tail. The way to get from the back pressurized compartment to the front is via a very narrow 6" wide shelf. The only way to do this is to put one knee in front of the other and scoot along while holding yourself on the shelf by slipping two fingers per hand between the gap in the vertical and horizontal ribs of the aircraft. On the ground this is scary since you're at least 10' above the bottom of the bomb bays. Because of the curvature of the hull you have to lean your body out over the bays so not many people would do that.

The A/C asked me to go to the gunner's position to find out what the heck was wrong with him since he sounded like he was going nuts. It turned out to be nothing since he was just watching the SAMs bursting around us.

So I went back there before the bomb run and came back after the bomb run. You cannot breath the air above 10,000 feet and remain conscious.

Funny that I've done it at least six times on a bicycle. Is it when you
don't have a bicycle handy that you lose consciousness?

Riding across the US, I went over Hoosier Pass in Colorado at 11,500 and remained conscious -- and in fact felt pretty peppy. More recently, however, I almost passed out riding in Utah at 10,715 -- but only because I was trying to keep up with my son. The grade wasn't that bad -- just long. https://bbrelje.wordpress.com/2013/0...ghway-cycling/

Time for a ride in the fog!

-- Jay Beattie.

People raised at or near sea level usually have altitude sickness at 10,000 ft or higher. This is medical fact so why are you guys trying to deny it?

Is it your pretense that aircraft are NOT pressurized above 10,000 feet? Jumping in with both feet with that fool Slocumb?

Altitude sickness is not passing out from lack of O2. It's feeling like **** and throwing up or almost throwing up. For me, mild SOB is the least of my problems when it comes to altitude sickness.

I've had mild altitude sickness coming from PDX and skiing at the top of Snowbird or Alta, which is 11,000. It gets worse with effort/dehydration. The worst altitude sickness I ever had was doing a speed climb up Mt. Adams with my wife and some friends. https://alpenglowsports.files.wordpr...adams-jpeg.jpg I decided to go full blast up the face below the false summit -- that step near the top. I about lost my lunch and felt like crap for the last section up to the real summit. Adams is not that high, so breathing was never a real issue. BTW, the great part about that climb is you can glissade down a butt-made bobsled chute much of the way back, braking now and then with an ice ax to avoid flying out of the chute. I ended up wearing a hole through my snow pants. I'll go from zero feet to 7,500 tomorrow morning for skiing, and I won't even register the change except for ear popping -- maybe a little SOB with hard effort, but that elevation gain doesn't make me sick.

-- Jay Beattie.

I worked at the Freeport copper mine, in Indonesia, during the first
year in operation when the maintenance facilities were at 10,000 ft
and the mine floor was about a 1,000 feet higher. Altitude sickness
effected everyone when they were first assigned there. The major
effects seemed to be a feeling of nausea and a head ache.

The worst part was that after they got you to the top, on a tram, they
took the passenger cab off and replaced it with a cargo platform to
haul parts and supplies up to the mine so while feeling sick you also
knew that there was no way down until quitting time.

--

Cheers,

John B.

On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:16:05 -0800, sltom992 wrote:

On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 12:37:21 PM UTC-8, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 11:59:05 -0800, sltom992 wrote:


Sitting in a meeting with some of the world's best engineers and
chemists.
the engineers said that making a chemical assay machine required two
IBM supercomputers.

Right, they were engineers and chemists, Not IT or was it still EDP
when this happened.

At the time these were $3 Million apiece.

That is not a "super computer". You did say"IBM"

I said, "I can do it with a micro processor."

Which one?
Or don't you know your terminology and are referring to a "miniframe"?
The sort of stuff that HP was flogging. Oh wait, are you sure that you
just didn't order a HP box that did that already.

I delivered ahead of schedule and below budget

Yep, plenty of us did that as PCs started eating the bottom out of the
"mainframe business".

You shouldn't show your ignorance.

And therein you confirm Rides call as a sad lonely ignorant toser. Bye

On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 15:51:13 -0600, AMuzi wrote:

On 1/19/2019 1:59 PM, wrote:

-snip just oodles of text-


Sitting in a meeting with some of the world's best engineers and
chemists. the engineers said that making a chemical assay machine
required two IBM supercomputers. At the time these were $3 Million
apiece. I said, "I can do it with a micro processor." I delivered ahead
of schedule and below budget so if you said, "It's him or me" you would
have been shown the door immediately.
-final snip-

That would be around 1990 right? Sounds familiar.

My brother's medical research imaging lab building included a full floor
for a Cray with cooling systems. He changed the whole department over to
some mini processors in parallel which by then outperformed a
supercomputer for graphics rendering.

Yep, Tom wasn't there and like all fraudsters he gets tripped up what was
really happening.

Those decades were very interesting from a graphics viewpoint. at one
stage, CAD was the big job, but that was replaced by GIS(geographic
information systems) where I first saw "terrain fly throughs" and then
the "games" market over took that through the visual demands of some of
the involved games like MMORPGs. If you were in the area, DDJ (Dr Jobs
Journal) gives a good history of the code develoment behind it all.

On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 22:48:31 +0000, Duane wrote:


When I was a kid I spent a few weeks in Montana. I remember hiking
around Bear Tooth pass outside of Red Lodge. I think it was around
10,000 ft. Coming from -7 feet in New Orleans I found it took some
getting used to. I wasn’t sick but had less stamina. Awesome place
though.

I thought you could breath up to 8000 meters or so without oxygen
tanks...

Keep in mind that some people climb Mt Everest without oxygen. As with
many things YMMV.

On 1/19/2019 4:24 PM, wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 12:50:14 PM UTC-8, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 1/19/2019 3:29 PM, wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 9:46:59 AM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 8:43:46 AM UTC-8, Mark J. wrote:
On 1/18/2019 8:02 AM, wrote:
On Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 5:31:41 PM UTC-8, John B. Slocomb wrote:
For Heaven's sake! Tom is an old man, who is in ill health and suffers
from brain damage. The thought that he is going to beat anyone up is
just another one of his fantasies, like flying around in the bomb bay
of airplanes at 5,000 feet over Vietnam.

And yet that is what happened. But then since you've done so little you wouldn't understand that life is strange and wonderful. The tail gunner in a B52D is actually in the tail. The way to get from the back pressurized compartment to the front is via a very narrow 6" wide shelf. The only way to do this is to put one knee in front of the other and scoot along while holding yourself on the shelf by slipping two fingers per hand between the gap in the vertical and horizontal ribs of the aircraft. On the ground this is scary since you're at least 10' above the bottom of the bomb bays. Because of the curvature of the hull you have to lean your body out over the bays so not many people would do that.

The A/C asked me to go to the gunner's position to find out what the heck was wrong with him since he sounded like he was going nuts. It turned out to be nothing since he was just watching the SAMs bursting around us.

So I went back there before the bomb run and came back after the bomb run. You cannot breath the air above 10,000 feet and remain conscious.

Funny that I've done it at least six times on a bicycle. Is it when you
don't have a bicycle handy that you lose consciousness?

Riding across the US, I went over Hoosier Pass in Colorado at 11,500 and remained conscious -- and in fact felt pretty peppy. More recently, however, I almost passed out riding in Utah at 10,715 -- but only because I was trying to keep up with my son. The grade wasn't that bad -- just long. https://bbrelje.wordpress.com/2013/0...ghway-cycling/

Time for a ride in the fog!

-- Jay Beattie.

People raised at or near sea level usually have altitude sickness at 10,000 ft or higher. This is medical fact so why are you guys trying to deny it?

Are you trying to deny that you said "You cannot breath the air above
10,000 feet and remain conscious"?


--
- Frank Krygowski

Tell you what Frank - why don't you take a balloon ride up to above 10,000 feet and we will all attend your wake. I also said that people acclimated to it can live at 19,000 feet, do you want to try that?

Good grief, Tom. The Alpine Visitor Center in Rocky Mountain National
Park is at 11,796 feet. Look it up. My wife, kid and I walked around it
on two separate trips. The place was full of other visitors. There were
no deaths, no inability to breathe, no wakes planned. And we drove the
rest of that road, which went over 12,000 feet.

Where on earth do you get your ideas??

Are you denying that aircraft are ALWAYS pressurized above 10,000 and that if they lose pressurization that oxygen masks automatically deploy?

I never said anything about pressurized aircraft. But I see he
https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-t...ssure-2870604/

"Federal Aviation Regulations say that without pressurization, pilots
begin to need oxygen when they fly above 12,500 feet for more than 30
minutes, and passengers have to use it continuously above 15,000."

Like so much else, your accounts of death at 10,000 feet appear to be
mistaken.

--
- Frank Krygowski

On 1/19/2019 2:44 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 2:21:36 PM UTC-8, Mark J. wrote:
On 1/19/2019 10:21 AM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 1/19/2019 11:43 AM, Mark J. wrote:
On 1/18/2019 8:02 AM, wrote:

So I went back there before the bomb run and came back after the bomb
run. You cannot breath the air above 10,000 feet and remain conscious.

Funny that I've done it at least six times on a bicycle.Â* Is it when
you don't have a bicycle handy that you lose consciousness?

I didn't ride it, but I saw bicycle tourists climbing Trail Ridge Road
in Rocky Mountain National Park, riding with full panniers. That one
goes over 12,000 feet.

I think the effect of altitude varies quite a bit from person to person.
I felt lightheaded just walking around the visitor center up there.

Trail Ridge Road was one of the six I was thinking of, and yes, we were
on our tandem with a full camping load, in 1984. Oh to be young again.

We lived in Colorado for two years. The other 10,000+ climbs were
Hoosier that Jay noted (three times for me), Independence, and a dirt
dead end road near Colorado Springs that ended at a ?microwave relay?
station at the mountaintop.

Colorado College, where I taught, had an annual end-of-September student
bike trip to Aspen, over Independence Pass (12,095 feet). I didn't do
that one, but reportedly lots of students did.

Funny you mention the lightheadedness. I never had that on the bike,
but when my brother came to visit, we took the cog railway to the top of
Pike's Peak. Granted that is 14,000+, but I felt distinctly woozy
getting out of the train, and it really startled me, after feeling fine
at 12,000 on the bike. I suspect it was because the cardiovascular
system was far from revved up.

The wooziness is what I think of as altitude sickness which is different from SOB. I liked the Colorado climbs I did because they were fairly low angle, and the total elevation gain was not that great because I was starting so high. I never did Mt. Evans or Pikes Peak or the really high climbs. BTW, I used to ride with Mike Engleman who won the Mt. Evans hill climb. I rode with him before he turned pro, but even then, he was pretty amazing.

-- Jay Beattie.

Agree about "altitude sickness;" I never understood the phrase
"shortness of breath." I understand breathing/wheezing uncontrollably
(and simultaneously wanting to die), but there's a huge amount of
breathing going on there. Or does SOB mean something else?

The Colorado high passes are indeed, if memory serves, in the 5-6% range
(I really should just look it up). I assumed at the time it was to keep
the cars and semis from expiring/exploding; I drove our 4-cylinder Dodge
Caravan over Vail pass on I-70 (10,662 ft BTW) and was surprised I made
it, for all the complaining the van did.

I'm pretty sure Mt. Evans (paved) is an exception to the mild-grade
design, though. I never rode to the top of that either. For the record,
the flyer for the /race/ up that road says the finish is at 14,100 feet.

There were no bicycles allowed on the Pikes Peak summit road while we
lived there, for general use or events; I'm pretty sure there's an
annual bicycle event now, though the road is apparently still unpaved.
I had a fantasy of painting the mountain bike with flat-black rinse-off
poster paint, wearing dark clothes, and sneaking past the tollbooth in
the middle of the night, to reach the summit at dawn. Probably was a
bad idea.

Mark J.

On 1/19/2019 4:28 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 11:37:25 AM UTC-8, wrote:
On Friday, January 18, 2019 at 5:15:51 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, January 18, 2019 at 11:55:49 PM UTC, wrote:

-another big snip-

I'm self-employed and pay both sides of FICA/FUTA and have for 25 years. I'm supporting people like you -- the SS welfare kings!

-- Jay Beattie.


kumbaya my brother.

I recently sat next to a recently retired woman in a diner
who said she's getting back a lot more than she paid in. I
found no path to explaining compound interest, the fact that
the 'other side' was her deferred wages nor that after
working 50 years she's unlikely to collect for another 50 years.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On 1/19/2019 7:04 PM, Mark J. wrote:

The Colorado high passes are indeed, if memory serves, in the 5-6% range
(I really should just look it up).

It's the Appalachians that are steep. On one trip across Pennsylvania,
my son (who then was an 18-year-old on the soccer team) threw down his
bike on an uphill and began kicking the hill because it was so steep.

I assumed at the time it was to keep
the cars and semis from expiring/exploding; I drove our 4-cylinder Dodge
Caravan over Vail pass on I-70 (10,662 ft BTW) and was surprised I made
it, for all the complaining the van did.

Our first trip up Trail Ridge Road in RMNP was driving a 1985 Honda
Civic station wagon with a tandem plus a single bike on the roof, my
mountain bike on the back, and pulling a camping trailer. That little
engine worked it's heart out, but it did the job... slowly.


--
- Frank Krygowski