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  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.”