Brief by Central Staff
Leadville – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Granted, the air is thin in Leadville, but it’s not nearly as thin as the air in a Los Angeles Times article about America’s highest incorporated city.
The article, by David Kelly, was syndicated and appeared locally in the March 23 edition of The Denver Post.
Kelly explained that with its mines closed, Leadville has been marketing its elevation of 10,200 feet, with “only 25% of the atmospheric pressure available at sea level.” He probably got that from “Dr. Lisa Zerdlinger, associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado at Denver, who lives in Leadville,” whom he quoted: “Our pressure is 25% of what it is at sea level.”
If that were true, we doubt anyone could live in Leadville, since you have to go considerably higher than Mt. Everest — and its infamous Death Zone — to get to an atmospheric pressure that is only 25% of sea level.
Air pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds per square inch on average, and it drops with altitude. At 8,080 feet (Buena Vista, more or less), it’s only 75% of sea level’s, or 10.83 psi. At Leadville’s (or Alma’s) elevation, it’s 9.81 psi, about 66% of the air pressure at sea level. Atop 14,433-foot Mt. Elbert, the highest spot in Colorado and a neighbor to Leadville, the pressure is 8.5 psi, or 55% of sea level.
Go to the highest spot on earth, 29,028-foot Mt. Everest, and you’ve still got about 31% of the pressure at sea level. To reach the 25% in the article, you’d have to climb to about 35,000 feet — up in the stratosphere, where commercial jets fly.
Work the numbers as we might, we can’t figure out how that “25%” got attached to Leadville. We thought at first it might be a misunderstanding of “25% less air than at sea level,” but it’s actually 33% less air than at sea level.
That said, we note that the thin air makes Leadville a bargain for certain forms of recreation — two beers there seem to have the same effect as three or four in Salida.
