Bee: I live at 5,000 feet. I think that helps a little, but it's not a big deal. I'm not climbing nearly as much as I did in the 90's, but I try to get up one of the nearby 10K peaks every week or two if I'm not doing something bigger. That helps acclimatization, but I don't think an hour or two above 10K makes a lot of difference. I have never spent extra time at a campground or trailhead just to acclimatize.
Bob, I was kind of amazed by your post, above, and some of the other things that you'd said in your associated post, in which you'd generally dismissed acclimatization, diamox, in general.
clearly, you start off by saying you live at 5,000 feet, so you are acclimatized to that altitude. but then you mention that you climb to 10k every week or so. So you are essentially acclimatized to 10k, inasmuch as you do that on a constant basis. In our last study, we could show an effect if someone had simply been above 10k in the previous MONTH. At all. I think that what you do has a huge effect. What then happened on Denali would then bear that out, as altitude increasingly had an effect on them, but not on you.
Diamox does have it's effect on the breathing aspects of AMS very quickly. It does NOT have such an effect on the other aspects of AMS, however. As you saw on Denali.
