Olivier Birot was approaching the summit of the Olan, a mountain in the French Alps, this summer when his body began failing him.
At 3,500 metres, dehydration and altitude stress triggered a physiological cascade that would end in helicopter rescue. For the York University professor, who grew up in these very mountains between France, Italy and Switzerland, the harrowing experience became an unexpected case study in extreme environment physiology.
The incident occurred during what Birot and his colleague, Professor Emilie Roudier, had planned as a mountain climbing experience.
Birot arrived at York in 2008 after training at Claude Bernard University in Lyon, with a specialty in extreme environmental physiology and serving as a defense scientist, studying how harsh conditions affect the human body. Roudier joined York in 2015, bringing expertise in microvascular health from her doctorate at Université Grenoble Alpes and postdoctoral work at the Karolinska Institute.
Both from the School of Kinesiology and Health Science in York’s Faculty of Health, they understand that real breakthroughs in physiology happen when you take the science beyond controlled laboratory conditions.
“You simply do not get that experience from reading research papers,” Birot says. Their summer climb would demonstrate that principle more dramatically than either had anticipated.
Birot’s ordeal began before dawn. After hiking to a mountain refuge the previous day, he and Roudier, along with Hugo, their mountain guide, left at 4 a.m. for the summit push. Four-and-a-half hours of non-stop climbing in the thin air triggered a cascade of physiological responses: dehydration, probable hypotension and what Birot suspects was altitude-related stress compounded by extreme fatigue.
“Muscle shivering was extremely intense and painful in all limbs, torso, jaw,” he says. “I was falling asleep between episodes, with numbness in my feet and hands and cognitive alteration.” Their guide radioed for helicopter rescue from the High Mountain Group of the French Gendarmerie.
“I was so focused on finding money in my bag to ensure Hugo and Roudier could buy food at the refuge that I was throwing things away on this tiny ledge,” Birot recalls of his disorientation that morning. “We were on about four square feet surrounded by 700- to 900-metre walls.”
For Birot, who also served seven years as a volunteer firefighter, the ability to analyze his own physiological responses in real-time wasn’t entirely surprising. The rescue involved being winched from a narrow ledge and flown to intensive care in Briançon. It took him 48 hours to fully recover, but the experience gave him something textbooks never could: personal data on his body’s response to multiple environmental stressors.
While Birot’s dramatic rescue will anchor his classroom discussions, Roudier collected data throughout both climbs using smart watches to monitor heart rate variability, GPS tracking and cardiovascular responses to the demanding ascents to share in her lessons. The practical limitations (no access to laboratory equipment for blood samples or precise oxygen uptake measurements) surprisingly enhanced the educational value.
“With the GPS traces, I can show students a 3D view of the ascent and the environment we were exposed to,” says Roudier, whose research examines how environmental factors influence microvascular health. “Most of my students go to the gym to stay healthy. Not all of them know what it’s like to be in an environment like these mountains.”
Now, weeks after their return to Toronto, both professors are incorporating their mountain experience into their York teaching. “What was really interesting is knowing that we can bring this back to the classroom,” Roudier says. “We can definitely share this experience with students.”
The real innovation lies in how they’re weaving their mountain research into curriculum. Roudier is expanding her KINE 4450 course to include epigenetic knowledge: how exercise modifies gene expression without changing DNA sequences. The mountain experience sparked her interest in how these genetic adaptations help mountain guides thrive in harsh environments.
“When we see how mountain guides thrive in this harsh environment, we would like to know what drives their remarkable capacity to move with ease,” she explains. “It would be something cool to explore in the classroom.”
Birot, meanwhile, has ambitions to design a field research program that could take York students directly to alpine environments. Working with professional mountain guides and international collaborators in the U.K., Italy, Czech Republic and Corsica, he envisions a “portable research toolbox” that can operate on mountains where, as he puts it, “true physiology happens.”
As part of this initiative, Birot is working with Roudier and Professors Michael Paris and Roni Jamnik to reproduce the climb in a lab environment. Using a very steep treadmill and a hypoxic generator, they aim to mimic the hike to test components of the toolbox.
“Mountaineering is a complex activity combining many physiological and environmental stressors,” Birot says. “Physical exhaustion, cognitive stress, dehydration, hypothermia, altitude: all were there in my experience.”
At York, that means pushing learning beyond controlled laboratory conditions. Roudier notes that when professors bring their own research into the classroom, it changes how students engage with the material. “It makes it easier to turn real-world experience into a case study,” she says.
Both professors acknowledge the irony: Birot’s most valuable teaching moment came from a climb he couldn’t finish. But he sees it as emblematic of the kind of real-world learning that happens when classrooms expand beyond campus boundaries.
“I was lucky the weather conditions were compatible with the helicopter flying,” Birot says. “That was a scary experience, but invaluable for me as a physiology teacher.”