The Longevity Project | Part 1: Why do residents of Colorado’s mountain towns live longer than anyone else in the country?
Deepan Dutta | For the Vail Daily

Frank Walter is 95, but that doesn’t stop him from skiing regularly. He is one of the remarkable seniors who has earned Summit the distinction of having the highest life expectancy in the country.
All photos by Hugh Carey | hcarey@summitdaily.com
Chuck Kauffman talks about his lifestyle at 81, and what he thinks is the key to living long.
THE LONGEVITY EVENT
Why does Eagle County, and other prosperous Colorado mountain counties, have the highest life expectancy in the country? Speaker Tony Buettner, with the Blue Zones Project, will provide science-based answers on Wednesday, Feb. 28, during the Vail Daily’s “The Longevity Project” event at Vail Mountain School.
Doors will open at 5 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available now on the Vail Daily website.To find the path to long life and health, the Blue Zones team study the world’s “Blue Zones,” communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age.
Buettner is the senior vice president of business development at Blue Zones, a Minnesota-based team that puts the research of National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner into action in communities across the country.
Dan Buettner is the New York Times best-selling author of “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest,” “Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way” and “The Blue Zones Solution.”
In this first installment in a four-part series on longevity, the Vail Daily, in partnership with the Summit Daily News, will dig deeper into why people in the state’s central mountains live longer than anyone else in the United States. And as the series progresses over the next three Tuesdays, we’ll also look at how the Ageless Alps of Colorado stack up against so-called “Blue Zones,” geographically isolated areas throughout the world where people live well into their 100s. Additionally, we’ll weigh the pluses and minuses of mountain culture, where residents play (and drink) hard, but also battle significant mental health challenges and economic inequality. And then we’ll peer into the future to see just how well-prepared we are to care for our aging population.
A HIGH HONOR
A report published last year by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) set mountain towns abuzz.
Titled “Inequalities in Life Expectancy Among US Counties, 1980 to 2014,” the study found that Summit and neighboring Pitkin and Eagle counties had the highest life expectancies in the nation at 86.83, 86.52 and 85.94 years, respectively.
Meanwhile, a 2014 report published in the Aging and Disease medical journal found an association between living at high altitude and “lower mortality from cardiovascular diseases, stroke and certain types of cancer.” When it comes to health grades, central Colorado’s mountain counties are at the top of the class.

Chuck Kauffman Monday, Jan. 29 in Summit Cove.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The Longevity Project seeks to better understand what it means for Eagle County to have the third-highest life expectancy in the United States.Tuesday, Feb. 6: What’s the secret behind Colorado mountain towns’ peerless longevity?Tuesday, Feb. 13: Is Eagle County a Blue Zone, a designation for areas around the world that have a high number of centenarians?Tuesday, Feb. 20: Not everyone shares in the lifespan lottery. We’ll look at the pluses and minuses of mountain culture, where residents play (and drink) hard and also battle significant mental health challenges.Tuesday, Feb. 27: We live longer here, but when it comes to caring for our aging population, many mountain communities fall short.
Socioeconomic factors also affect awareness and affordability of a balanced diet, physical fitness and avoidance of risk factors, such as smoking and excess drinking. Being well-off also affords individuals more opportunities for recreational and social activities, which can impact physical and mental health and, by extension, life expectancy.
Frank Walter Tuesday, Jan. 16, in Copper.Health care: Similarly, access and proximity to solid health insurance and quality health care is based, in large part, on geography and income. Summit and Eagle counties have a level III trauma center, St. Anthony Summit Medical Center in Summit and Vail Health in Vail. Eagle County has an assisted living center for seniors in Castle Peak Senior Care Community. When it comes to life-or-death emergencies, every second matters. Mokdad, who is based in Seattle, gives an example of what that means in practice.
“Say I have a heart attack, here in Seattle,” he said. “It would take 10 minutes for me to get admitted to one of the best medical centers in the country.”
On the other hand, a person in rural Eastern Washington, or in the western plains of Colorado, might be hours away from the nearest trauma center. According to the Colorado Rural Health Center, 85 percent of Americans can reach a level I or level II trauma center within an hour, but only 24 percent of rural Americans can do so within that timeframe, helping explain why 60 percent of all trauma deaths occur in rural areas.
The type and quality of medical specialists available locally or regionally also contributes to the health care factor. While many mountain communities like Eagle and Summit counties lack full-time specialists in some areas, access to treatments for chronic illnesses has been improving. St. Anthony opened a specialty care and infusion center last year that offers chemotherapy and IV treatment for other chronic diseases like Crohn’s disease.
“We’re a county that has a hospital and medical care, unlike other rural areas that don’t have access to good medical care,” said Dr. Peter Lemis, a cardiologist practicing in Frisco at Summit Cardiology. “The emergency response teams, and the fact that we have a hospital here … definitely contribute to the health of the county and have helped save many lives.”

Chuck Kauffman Monday, Jan. 29 in Summit Cove.

Frank Walters skiing at Copper Mountain Wednesday, Jan. 17.

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BOOK DISCUSSION
In anticipation of The Longevity Project event, the Vail Daily will host a free book discussion of “The Blues Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest,” by Dan Buettner, from 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 20, at The Bookworm of Edwards.Light refreshments will be provided. Paperback copies of the book are available for $14.95 from The Bookworm, located at 295 Main St. in the Riverwalk at Edwards, or through the event listing online at http://www.bookwormofedwards.com. Call The Bookworm at 970-926-7323 to RSVP for the discussion.
Lemis agrees with that assessment.
“Most people who live here weren’t born here,” he said. “We went from a few thousand people in Summit in the 1960s to almost 30,000 people in the county now as residents.”
He points out that the type of people who move into the county are active and healthy to begin with.
“People with pre-existing conditions don’t move here, for the most part,” he said.
Conditions that are exacerbated by elevation-related illnesses include high-altitude pulmonary edema, a condition that causes fluid buildup in the lungs, as well as central sleep apnea, which is caused by the pressure and oxygen changes associated with altitude.
Rosen and Lemis both believe the high life expectancy number to be somewhat artificial. They point to the fact that once seniors are unable to have their needs met in the mountains, they must move elsewhere.
Reasons can include wanting to be close to family who have already moved, needing special medical treatment or moving into a senior living facility that can better care for them. They tend not to come back, and they die elsewhere. That skews the numbers, they argued.
“When people develop a medical condition that makes it harder to live at high altitude where there is 20 percent less oxygen at sea level, they might move,” Lemis said. “Another issue is if they get severely ill and need to be hospitalized beyond the level of care Summit can provide, they might move or get transferred to Denver and die there. So we don’t have as many people die here for that reason.”
The Summit County Coroner’s Office reported in 2016 that the county had 10 “out-of-jurisdiction” cases, which involve patients who started dying in Summit but were transferred out of the county and passed away elsewhere. The coroner reported 82 deaths in Summit in 2016, and 42 of those deaths were visitors from outside the county.
Mokdad said that the IMHE report did take migration into account, but it was not a big factor for life expectancy.