Every semester I try to hike the M trail on the last day I’m on campus. This time around it coincided with a clear day and some snow on the mountains, so I packed a camera along with me.
Missoula in the morning
Looking up the Rattlesnake
Lolo Peak and Lolo Creek
Sign at the top of the M
Looking east toward Bonner
Looking past the Loyola L up the Rattlesnake
As I was driving home last night from visiting relatives in the Bitterroot, I heard on NPR that loud noises makes us dumber. The scientist who they were interviewing said something to the effect that loud noises distract and confuse people to a certain degree, as evidenced by the fact that, say, when people are watching football (or some other sport) in a sports bar, and a game you’re not watching has something exciting happen, you’ll turn and look at what caused the commotion, temporarily shifting your attention from what you were doing.
Why did this grab my attention, you ask? Well, working in helitack for several years now has shown me that for whatever reason, people sometimes do really strange things when near a helicopter. I’ve had hotshots superintendents with 20+ years of fire experience hop out of a helicopter, spot where they want to go, and head for it, even if it means walking towards the tail rotor. I’ve had to physically grab people and shove them in the right direction, again, because they headed towards the tail rotor. It’s a very explicit rule when working with helicopters that, to stay safe, you stay away from the rotors when they are moving. It’s just good sense, and any normal person will agree, when the rotors aren’t turning.
Now, when you add the noise of the turbine engine, the whopping of the main rotor, and the buzzing of the tail rotor (which is moving roughly seven times faster than the main rotor), and it starts to get interesting. Us rotorheads obviously get desensitized to this after a while, but it no doubt gets the adrenaline pumping to walk under the rotors and go to work. In the helitack world there is a term for the distracted state that some people get into when around a running helicopter – “rotor psychosis.” While it is something that I train all my crewmembers to look for, I never really thought that there was a real explanation for it. I just understood that it was some combination of adrenaline, psychology (spinning rotors make for a good nerve-wracking experience), and the confusion of not being able to think because of the noise.
Now I know there’s a good scientific explanation for it. See, you really CAN learn something new every day.
