Mount Whitney

Mount Whitney

Last week Sarah N9ZZT was looking for someone to visit Mount Whitney with her for a training climb to the top and I volunteered to go along with her as a "support" person.

We arrived Friday morning in Lone Pine, picked up our Mount Whitney passes after some difficulities with the rangers and their computer system, had pizza for lunch and enough left over for supper. Friday evening we slept in the bed of my truck after we had stored all of our food in the steel bear lockers. Since Sarah wanted an early start, we went to bed at sometime after 7 PM. The bears appear to be most active in early evening as they patrolled the stream area down stream and then in the early morning working their way back upstream. We have pictures of one of the bears that visited us Friday evening in the hiker's camp.

Sarah's alarm awoke us about 12:30 AM. While Sarah was putting last minute touches on her pack, I cooked up breakfast for her on the little Pepsi ONE alcohol stove which does work at over 8,000 feet. From scouting reports Friday afternoon, we heard that above 10,000 feet we were going to run into snow and that while during the early morning hours it might support your weight that as the temperature became warmer during the day that you would break through the upper layer and start post holing.

"Post holing," as they call it was when you broke through the upper crust with your leg(s) sinking in all the way to your hip. On the way off of the mountain in the afternoon I seemed to "post hole" sometimes on almost ever step. Once I went in so deep that I was trapped for several minutes while I tried everything I could think of to get my right leg out without the left one sinking in. Sort of reminded me of the Colorado River when Glenn KE6ZLY and Erwin WB7ATT were with me sinking into the mud banks along the river banks above lake Mead.

Sarah left her snow shoes in the truck feeling that they would not support her weight properly when needed but she did take her snow/ice cleats which she wore after hitting the snow line. The previous weekend, Sarah and John KT6E used snow shoes on the technical side of the mountain and were able to only get to 11,000 feet before fatigue forced them to turn back.

So why start at 1 AM? Well, everyone indicated that on good days it would take you 16 hours if everything went well. With the condition of the snow, Sarah felt that by starting at 1 AM that she might make it back into camp by 5 PM with luck. Because of the bad snow conditions, she made it back by a little after 6 PM.

Hiking in snow at night on trails that have been covered in snow is no mean feat. I lost the trail several times in the snow during daylight hours. For the first 4 hours you are in the dark with only your headlight ... and you have to cross at least three streams which is hard enough during daylight hours. Base camp is at 8,360 feet and Mount Whitney is 10.7 miles away at 14,497.61 feet. Sarah was alone all the way up and back except for two hikers she met on the upper ridge who went with her the last mile or so to the top of Mount Whitney. They had started from the upper base camp that day which I think is near to 12,000 feet.

Since I was not considering this a "practice" hike like Sarah (she is soon headed for Mt. Rainier and Shasta), I was looking at a calmer day. I ate and left camp at 5:45 by myself and had a really pleasant hike up until about 10,000 where I really started running into deep snow. Up until that time it was more like passing through snow drifts that got larger and larger. On the way up I took a side hike to Little Lone Pine lake which was frozen over. Lone Pine lake is at 9,850 feet. Going back to the main trail I passed through Outpost Camp at 10,365 feet where I met a group of Korean hikers from Fullerton CA. At 10,640 feet I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mirror lake was clear of all snow and ice but after leaving Mirror Lake it did not take long to run into some deep snow which would still support one's weight.

During the early morning and later in the day, Sarah and I tried to keep in touch with each other via our amateur radio frequency 147.555 so it was comforting to know that she was still on her schedule of reaching the peak before noon.

Because of some of my long winded conversations and local exploring, the Korean group caught up with me as we entered a rather deep snow field. I was up ahead of them slightly and tried to get them to move up along a rock out cropping rather then stay on the trail filled with snow. One of their group, despite my waving and yelling to her, decided to climb directly up a steep slope in the snow. I know very little about snow slides except that steep hillsides are prone to slipping away under certain conditions. I was able to get the remaining of the group not to follow the example of this one woman. Earlier in the day I was able to take pictures of three snow slides covering almost 1,000 feet in length.

The Korean woman was able to make it up to just under a rock ledge when she broke through and sank in up to her armpits with her overnight pack. I could see after several minutes of struggling that she had some real problems so I worked my way up and around to the rock ledge and down to where she was below the ledge. I lowered one foot and she attached her pack to it and I drug it higher up on the rock ledge. I then returned and anchored myself and instructed her to grab hold of my legs which she was rather reluctant to do but by her holding onto my legs, it evidentially lessened her weight on the snow and she was able to scramble up on the ledge beside me.

I hiked with the Korean group for the next hour and had an opportunity to practice speaking and writing some Korean words I had not used in 50 years. I was also able to sing an old Korean folk song with one of the girls.

When I was at about 11,000 feet, Sarah radioed that she only had about an hour to go to reach the top so I turned around and headed back on the path I had come up only to find that the snow had changed and I did a lot of post holing for much longer than I wanted. Several people coming up past me had wet feet and they warned me about the snow near several streams being tricky and that they had fallen through the snow into the stream. Within about a quarter of a mile I saw an upward bound hiker fall through the snow into the same stream I was warned about. I don't think that hiking up the mountain with wet feet is much fun.

Going down the mountain, except for the post holing above 10,000 feet, turned out to be a breeze although I ran out of water in my main pack. Fortunately, I had thrown in a water bottle with a filter which I used the rest of the way down the mountain by stopping at several places where water was flowing out of the rocks. The water bottle filter is supposed to last for about 200 fillings so now it is down to about 188!

My self imposed turn around point was 11,000 feet or 11:30 AM .. depending on which came first. Luckly, they both occurred at about the same time. I was off the mountain by 2:30 PM and learned that Sarah was also on the way down after having reached the summit. I kept following her progress off the mountain and around 6 PM I started walking back up the trail to meet her. She was tired but in excellent spirts having acheived her "training" girl. To our knowledge, Sarah was the only day climber to reach the peak Saturday.

We left the camp ground Saturday evening and drove to Fossil Falls where we again camped in the back of the truck. The trip home was uneventful. Sarah got her "training" hike in and I had a very pleasant hike about half way up Mount Whitney. The scenery on the mountain is fantastic and I ended up with about 60 some pictures taken on the hike. Mount Whitney will never be a "one day" hike for me!

Today, Monday, FaraA and I made a quick dash to the Santa Rosa Reserve and spent a pleasant day enjoying the scenery. I was expecting that there would be no Spring flowers left so I was pleasantly surprised to find lots of different kinds of flowers still blooming. We hiked out to the Vernal pools which have very little water in them now. On the outward hike, Fara, not being used to snakes, was concerned about a chance encounters with rattlesnakes but there were only lots of animal droppings ON the trail. Sometime some of our more "informed" hikers (dropping experts) are going to have to take pictures of this stuff for identification purposes so the rest of us know what we are looking at!

At the Vernal Pool we investigated the shrimp, saw MANY little frogs about 1/4th to 3/8th inch long, lots of tadpoles, snails, and as luck would have it while bending over with our faces only inches from the water surface, a snake slithered across the water below our faces at high speed ... which made Fara's day.

After reluctantly leaving the big show at the Vernal pool, we took off for the adobe buildings where we ate lunch, chatted, read signs, and discussed the world's problems. From there we hiked back to the where we left the truck. Then it was just a short drive to the Park-N-Ride in Temecula where Fara's car was parked.

Santa Rosa was my second hike this Memorial day weekend and most enjoyable but I am really sorry that I missed the Palomar Mountain Barker Valley hike, if it occured. This will make the second year that I have missed the overnight to the falls and pools.