People with hypoxia brave high elevations

BY DAN ENGLAND THE COLORADO SUN

Chantelle Shoaee will have a question for you if you decide to visit her: “What kind of car do you drive?”

Unless you’re one of her buds, perhaps one of her Hypoxic Hikers, the reason she’s asking may shock you. Rough mountain roads, the kind that ummox those who don’t drive Subarus — and yes, there are a few — lead to the little base camp where she lives and runs Always Choose Adventures.

Shoaee lives at 10,000 feet in a rural spot above Idaho Springs. She also has hypoxia, a condition de ned by low levels of oxygen in the body.

Doctors tell hypoxic patients to move out of Colorado. At Denver’s elevation, around 5,280 feet, there’s 20% less oxygen than at sea level. Whenever she’s walking around, Shoaee receives oxygen through a tube in her nose, called a cannula. She punctuates her sentences with pu s from her tank that sound like a gasp.

Oxygen is as much of a treasure to her as the gold from the long-closed mine on her land. And yet, she lives at twice the elevation of Denver, a space so devoid of O2 that most at-landers have trouble sleeping.

It seems like a mismatch, like a penguin wobbling through a desert. And yet, Shoaee climbs 14ers at speeds that would smoke a weekend peakbagger.

She wears a backpack comfortably and even helped design a pack being developed by Osprey, a Cortez-based gear company that specializes in hydration bladder vests and packs for bikers, hikers and ultrarunners.

Shoaee’s pack ts oxygen tanks. e innovation could be a boon for hikers tethered to a cannula: Most of them are anchored to heavy oxygen tanks or concentrators.

Shoaee loves the mountains, elevation be damned, and her strong body, balanced by a pair of powerful thighs, shakes with good-natured laughter when someone asks why the hell she lives so high.

“Look around,” she answers.

She doesn’t care that she lives in a small trailer, or that the property needs a lot of work, or that the roads that lead to it could overturn a Jeep. She’s immensely proud of where she lives, even though she knows, one day, she will have to leave.

Until then, Shoaee wants to run her organization, Always Choose Adventures, which helps people of all ages, backgrounds and, most importantly, physical abilities, experience the outdoors. She and her Hypoxic Homies, a group of hikers like her, all acknowl- edge their limitations the condition puts on them, but they don’t want to be limited by any kind of assumptions about their ability, or medical insurance, or misdiagnoses. ere are more than you might think: Shoaee puts severe limits on the money she makes so she can stay on Medicaid, which pays for her portable oxygen. Her place was a ordable because it was in poor condition, and because she sold her townhome, buoyed by the skyrocketing market. Quite frankly, it looks like a bargain, even if the land around it looks priceless.

“I live in poverty,” she says, “so I can breathe.”

On doctor’s orders, Shoaee’s parents kept her inside when she was a kid. She was born with tracheoesophageal stula, an abnormal connection between the esophagus and the trachea,