During the winter months, Southern California-based NASA aerospace engineer Frank Tai and his wife get their mountain-town fix through their condo in Breckenridge. For years the fix came with a cost: a day or two of debilitating altitude sickness. Tai said the pair made it a point to spend the first night of their visits to Colorado in Denver to mitigate symptoms.
Even so, once they got up to Breckenridge his wife would suffer through adjusting to the stark jump in elevation nearly every time. “She’d be in bed for two days,” he said. During a trip to visit a friend in Telluride, Tai was introduced to the concept of pumping oxygen into private residences to mitigate effects from altitude.
He was interested in learning more and wondered if one of these systems could help his wife, but wasn’t overly hopeful about the possibility of installing one in a condo versus a multi-room home. Still, he shopped around and came across Mile High Training , who ended up making it happen. Founder of Mile High Training Matt Formato said the machines he installs in homes like Tai’s take air from outside, separate the nitrogen and oxygen, discard the nitrogen and pump the oxygen into an area to “offset” the altitude.
Through changing the percentage of oxygen in a room, the system simulates a lower altitude. Someone in the room would feel as though they were thousands of feet lower in elevation than they actually are. Tai said the 9,600 foot hike in elevation no longer has the impact.
