High Altitude Living

We knew there would be adjustments to living at a high altitude. Greenville, South Carolina's altitude is 966 feet and Colorado Springs is 6035 feet. It is not an exaggeration when I say that we were out of breath walking up our 3 flights of stairs to our apartment the first few weeks here. Now I can walk up the stairs without getting short of breath, but when I have to carry something like a mountain bike or a full load of groceries up the stairs then I am short of breath. Thankfully, from talking with other people and friends this is usual for anyone moving from a low altitude to high altitude state during the first weeks. It's all an adjustment. The second week here Caleb & I did some hiking which I think was great to push ourselves. The #1 thing we had to do while hiking was definitely stay hydrated. 

The most common piece of advice people give to us when they hear we moved here from South Carolina is DRINK LOTS OF WATER. Everyone was very adamant about the fact that we need to be drinking a lot more water than we did back in SC. So we started drinking lots of water, and I've been re-filling water bottles everyday and putting them in the fridge so I have one to take with me anytime we leave the house. I found a good description online of why you need to drink more water living in a higher altitude. Here is the excerpt about it. 

"At 6000 feet above sea level, you exhale and perspire twice as much moisture as you do at sea level. Over the course of a day, that is a lot of water, and can make a difference of a quart or more a day. At higher altitudes, it gets even more pronounced.

Higher altitude means lower air pressure. This results in more rapid evaporation of moisture from skin surface, and from your lungs. Most high altitude areas are also very low in humidity, which means evaporation is further accelerated. The combination of those two factors means that the higher up you are, the more water you need to keep your body functioning."

Some other small adjustments we've had living in a high altitude place for the first time is:

1) When you take your food out of the oven, it does not stay warm as long. It cools faster so it's hard to have a piping hot dinner on the table for someone who likes their food steaming. (Both of our dads like their food hot on the table so we'll have to time out the cooking right so everything finishes around the same time so we can have hot food for dinner).

2) Our towels and hair dry pretty fast here! It seems like it takes half the time to dry my hair. The bath mat on the floor even dries up a lot faster after showers than it did in SC. The humidity is a lot lower here so the dry air makes a difference. One piece of information someone told us here is that sometimes when you look out at the clouds you can see that it looks like rain is falling, but the rain actually doesn't hit the ground sometimes because it will evaporate before it can hit the ground. Now this isn't the case every time because it rained for just about 15 minutes this afternoon today and the rain definitely made it to the ground.

3) A lot of homes here were built without air conditioning. Many apartment complexes do not have A/C either. It's just not used as much because there are really only about 2-3 weeks throughout the summer where it will get hot enough that you want A/C. We have a small wall unit that we can use, but we've been able to have our windows open every day and night so far. It cools down so much at night that it cools the house off and it keeps it very comfortable throughout the day even. We've only had a few days that it has been over 80 here so I bet we'll end up turning it on if it ever gets above 90.

4) I love that there aren’t many bugs in Colorado Springs. Living in SC I used to say that I wanted to move somewhere that had no bugs. I didn't really think this was possible because I thought bugs were everywhere. Well there are bugs here, but a lot less. I haven't quite learned the exact reason as to why yet. Maybe because it stays colder longer in the winters or maybe it's because it's a dryer climate so there isn't humidity that attracts the bugs. There are still ants outside building ant hills, but you usually don't hear about a cockroach problem here, beetles, earwigs, and other creatures that I do not prefer to have living around.


It's been fun learning about a different part of the country. I have always loved to travel because it's great to see new places and explore, but I think it's even more fun to move to a new place because you learn and adapt to more than a short vacation somewhere. We're loving the Colorado life!