if you had a bit of dough you could hook up one of these setups from white industries...

http://www.whiteind.com/ENO-cranks-specs.html

they call it the double double. the idea is that you use either a 38/16 or a 35/19 ratio which both end up having the same chain length. i'm not sure how much that would help though because it would take a fair bit of messing around to change gears.