Mountain Man

  PRIYA SHARMA First-year graduate student and physics
Teaching Assistant David Brown is shown doing lab
work. Besides teaching and working at Adventure 16, Brown is an
experienced outdoorsman who climbs mountains in his free time.

By Marjorie Hernandez
Daily Bruin Contributor

First-year graduate student and physics teaching assistant Dave
Brown loves climbing mountains.  An accomplished outdoorsman,
Brown, 23, took up mountaineering for the physical and mental
challenges it gave him.

“I love mountaineering because it’s such a
combination of brains and brawn, “Brown said.
“There’s a lot of science to it . “

Though he has climbed Mount Everest and Colorado’s Mount
Democrat, Brown feels he faces a greater challenge every day
““ time management.

Brown divides his time with the outdoors, school and work at
Adventure 16, a camping store in Los Angeles.

  Photo courtesy of David Brown David
Brown, besides being a TA, is also an outdoor enthusiast.
He’s shown here in one of his favorite activities, climbing.
“Grad school is surprising, ” Brown said. “I
thought it would be like two years of undergrad, you know, partying
and all of that. But it’s pretty stressful.”

“Budgeting my time is my greatest challenge,” Brown
said. “Climbing mountains is much easier.”

But no amount of planning could have prepared Brown for what
would happen on his climbing excursion to Mount Whitney.

“Cool. Free ice axe,” Brown initially thought as he
and climbing partner Manuel Chirouze, another physics TA, came upon
the tool after their descent from Mount Whitney’s 14,460 feet
summit to their camp in Iceberg Lake Nov. 19.

Then concern began to sink in as Brown and Chirouze saw no other
climbers near the abandoned ice axe.

“You know, we might be looking for a body here,”
Brown said.

At the bottom of a snow-filled gully, the two noticed a large
rock covered with blood. Near it, a trail of blood led them back to
their own tent.

Inside, they found Javier Ybarra, another mountaineer who had
slid down the mountain and collided into the rock. As they saw
Ybarra’s face caked in blood, Brown and Chirouze knew they
would have to act quickly.

Brown prepared to descend the mountain to call for help, while
Chirouze stayed with Ybarra to keep him stabilized.

Barely conscious, Ybarra requested Brown to write his
number.

“Call my wife,” Ybarra said. “Tell her I love
her.”

In freezing temperatures, Brown began to make his way down
12,000 feet. Frantic with panic and concern, he suddenly slipped
and headed toward the mountain’s ledge.

Without hesitation, Brown quickly dug his ice axe into the snow,
saving his own life.

“I was pretty shaken up at that point, and I realized that
I was preserving the life of two climbers now,” said Brown.
“So I stood up and shook my nerves and said, “˜Alright,
I got to get down here safely and rationally. His life isn’t
worth yours.'”

What took them two days to climb up, Brown descended within two
hours.

“All of a sudden this amazing feeling came over when I was
completely in the zone, like I’ve never been before,”
he said.

Once at the bottom, he was able to call for help. But due
to the darkness and frigid temperatures, the search and rescue team
helicopters were unable to reach the trapped climbers until the
next morning.

Ybarra was eventually air lifted to a nearby hospital where he
was treated for possible skull fractures and a broken nose.

Despite his own ordeal, Brown talked about Chirouze, who
massaged Ybarra’s frostbitten toes and kept a constant
vigil.

“Manuel refused to sleep that night because he wanted to
monitor Javier to make sure he wasn’t going to loose
consciousness,” said Brown. “I’m really proud of
Manuel. I’d climb with him anytime.”

Brown left the incident with a heightened perspective on
climbing.

“I learned that as rewarding as an alpine environment can
be, it can also be absolutely treacherous if you don’t know
what you’re doing,” he said. “But that’s
why we climb mountains in the first place ““ to better
ourselves as people and stretch out comfort zones and really just
challenge ourselves and grow.”

At UCLA, Brown teaches static and kinetic physics, an area
familiar to him because of his background in aerospace engineering
and astrophysics, which were his major and minor at the University
of Colorado, Boulder.

“My role is to teach the students an analytical process
that’s written in their lab books,” said Brown.
“I just like to see a lot of scientific reasoning in there.
I’m trying to teach them to think like scientists.”

Students in his Physics 6A labs said they enjoy the relaxed
learning environment Brown brings to the class.

“He explains stuff before lab really well so it makes it a
lot easier to go through,” said second-year biology student
Andrew Mercado. “Especially for people like me who really
don’t get it very well, he takes his time out to help me
through it. He’ll show you enough attention so he can make
sure that you understand.”

Other students said they benefit from Brown’s open
communication.

“He’s a pretty good TA. Whenever we have questions
he tries to clear them up as much as possible,” said
third-year biology student Angelica Oropeza. “He’s not
intimidating at all. He’s pretty kick-back, which makes
it easy to communicate.”

“When I see him anywhere on campus, he says hi,” she
continued. “Other TA’s will just cross you and react
like, “˜I don’t know you.'”

Although he enjoys teaching, Brown said he’s “not
really big on grading papers.”

“Eventually I would want to be a discussion TA and dive
more into physics with the students,” he said. “I think
that would be more fun.”

Currently, Brown keeps his plate full with biomedical
engineering graduate course where he is focusing on tissue
engineering.

A fairly new specialty, tissue engineering looks to harvest
human DNA samples from stem cells from which new organs will be
developed.

With school, work and teaching taking up most of his time, Brown
finds perspective from his mountain excursions.

Even then, he connects his climbing to his teaching.

“There’s a lot of strategy, yet it takes a lot of
endurance to make it up and a lot of physical attributes as
well,” Brown said. “I could teach a class in the
physics of rock climbing.”