Well, this is the big one, isn’t it? I’d had Mt. Whitney on my list for a long time, and I finally did it. This trail is interesting. If you take the main route, it is trail (and good trail) all the way. You can go in late summer and run into no ice or snow (though we did get some ice pellets!) It is 11 miles one way from Whitney Portal, and gains some 6100′ on the way to the summit at 14,505′, the tallest summit in the continental United States. It seems just like another hard, but not ridiculous trail.
But up at those kinds of elevations, the game changes. I felt pretty physically crappy at the top. I possibly pushed it a little further than I should have, but heck, I didn’t puke. But I saw a super fit guy in his 20s turn around at 9,000′. I talked to an older man in his 60s near the summit who said he had summited many many times, and could never understand how fit people could not make the trip…until he got violently ill on his 7th time up the mountain.
Anyway. I did this trail, camping the night before at Whitney Portal at 8k’ or so, spending one night along the way at Trail Camp at 12,000′ feet, then summiting and descending the following day. It was physically taxing to me, and I was definitely exhibiting signs of elevation sickness…but I made it. It is a beautiful trip, exempliyfing many of the beautiful things in the Sierras, and I spent a lot of it being miserable. Next time, the mountaineer’s route!
view west from the summit
View of Keeler Needle and Mt Whitney from the Whitney Portal Road.
Day 0: We drove up to the trailhead the night before we planned to start, on the 6th. We got up to Whitney Portal and set up our campsite. We dropped back down into Lone Pine to grab some dinner, get a water purifier, and buy a few groceries. The pizza in town is really quite good 🙂 We went back up to the campsite at that point, and mostly just went to bed.
Day 1: We started out pretty early, but not all that early. The trailhead photos are from 7.20 AM, so let’s say we got going at 7.30 AM. I weighed my pack at the trailhead scale – 29 lbs, not too shabby. Though I was carrying neither the tent nor the bear can, so I got off easy, I guess.
Weigh that pack!
The trail starts out quite pleasantly, cutting between some grassland like areas and the scrubby plants you expect into the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The beginning trail elevation is 8400′ or so, however, so none of the plant cover is all that dense. We took a minor detour to go look at Lone Pine Lake, which is quite pretty, as such things are wont to be, and gave us quite the view out over the Owens Valley.
Lone Pine Lake. I like the line of trees.
From there, to no real surprise, the trail keeps going up and up. It starts to cut through some really amazing granite outcroppings, even though we were still below treeline. A few miles along, we arrived at Bighorn Sheep Park. The word “park” here is used as I’ve seen it in the Pacific Northwest, to label something I’ve more often seen called a “meadow”. This one was really rather beautiful, and definitely a nice break from the rock/tree/scrub landscape we’d been mostly seeing up to this point. At the end of the park is Outpost Camp, 3.8 miles from the trailhead, with a nice little waterfall right next to it.
A bit before we got to the park, you cross into….the Whitney Zone! Note the many rocks.
Ben takes a brief break at Outpost Camp before we head on.
Trailside Meadow, one of the last areas with many plants…getting closer!
Shockingly, after this…the trail keeps heading up. It got a bit tougher after this point, or at least did for me, between the altitude and the getting steeper. Ben was mostly ahead of me at this point, so at some point I had to ask some people who were passing me to ask him to stop when they saw him, so I could get some food ! Oops; poor planning.
I felt a great deal better after getting to eat something, and we soldiered on, at this point entirely above treeline, until we arrived at Trail Camp.
As we were getting closer, it appeared on our map that we should be getting to Consultation Lake any moment now, just before arriving at Trail Camp, and as we kept expecting, and kept expecting to see that…we never did, since it was behind a ridge and at no point really visible from the trail. Go go gadget map reading skills!
Once we got to Trail Camp, we crashed a bit, set up camp, got some water, and then…it started to hail. Good times! Actually, it was pretty cool, since I had gotten my wind back and had eaten and chatted with some other people a bit. I walked with some other people for a while, and then we went to bed pretty early since we were going to do all the rest of the trail (summit + out) the next day.
Our campsite at Trail Camp – that is the trail right behind the tent.
Trail Camp is a popular place.
Get your water while you can!
Seriously…it was hailing
Plan for the morning…that way.
Day 2: We got up early, and we headed on out. From Trail Camp, the next thing one does is head up a wall of switchbacks. They are all pretty well graded and laid out, and apparently were rebuilt in 1999-2000 or so. Up and up and up and up…we started before sunrise, and could already see all the little headlamps moving up. I took a break every few switchbacks, taking pictures of the false dawn, and how much the sun peeked over the horizon every time I had gone another set of switchbacks, until the sun really was coming up, and spreading some brilliance over the landscape.
Real dawn arrived
Light pouring across the rock. There is a person right in the center, if you want some scale.
Once you get to the top of the switchbacks, you have arrived at Trail Crest, which is the border with Sequoia National Park. I do enjoy being on the interfaces between places, and for bonus points, it was really great to get up there and suddenly have this absolutely fabulous view open up before you. I could see down to the Hitchcock Lakes, and a great panorama beyond. After a bit of a break, and several more pictures, I kept going. The trail at this point cuts behind the palisade of stone right there, and you are more or less walking along a narrow ridge. This is well into “just rocks and lichen” territory, and I just kept trudging. This feel like it should be the “easy” part, but the elevation was challenging. At the junction where my trail met up with the JMT coming up from the valley below, I was definitely starting to feel not all that great, but from there you can *see* the summit. And by “see” I mean in a nearby tangible sense, not in the way that you can “see” it from the highway.
At Trail Crest. It was hard to find somewhere to prop my camera.
No guns.
At the junction. It was bright out.
The trail cuts behind the needles by which I often identify Whitney from the highway, and then switches behind and then switchbacks up the back slope of Whitney proper. At this point, I was feeling pretty much like crap. It took me a really long time to get to the summit, and I was feeling pretty garbagey when I got there. Definitely some elevation sickness going on, but I was *so close* so I definitely went to the verge of stupid. Oh well. But I made it! I got to the summit, and sat down to wait and see if I would start feeling any better, but after about 15 minutes I wasn’t, really, so I took my photos and headed back down. I was taking a lot of breaks, not really in the best best of shape, but I knew I had to keep going. Some people very kindly kept me company for some little bits.
Almost…there…. (big flat area in the middle)
Summit plaque! Poorly lit, but “pics, and it happened”
I felt really bad in this photo. But man, that is some view behind me.
As I got back to Trail Crest (you know…all the way back down at 13,600′) I definitely was feeling a lot better. I guess that’s the only good thing about elevation sickness…you can feel really better just by going down! Of course, then, the weather started rolling in… So I started to book it down the switchbacks. It being cooler, and downhill, and me feeling not sick gave me a lot more motivation. It even started hailing again while I was on the switchbacks, but since I always had good local visibility, this was ok. Anyway, the rush down from there did get a bit challenging, but in the end we made it all the way out, and successfully had dinner and went home. Woo ha!
The weather rolled in seriously rapidly.
Final view of Whitney, from US 395.
