Day Hike Summiting Mt. Whitney

May 21, 2016

To date, this hike was easily the hardest and most physically demanding thing I've put myself through. I was lucky enough to acquire four day hike passes through recreation.gov and so my friends Brian, Sheila, and Lauren joined me on an epic adventure. Having done extensive research, I knew that doing this hike in May would be more demanding because of the presence of snow above the 9,000" range and because of that far more rewarding. We drove down a day early to Lone Pine, CA in an attempt to acclimate and get settled. We stayed at the Lone Pine Best Western and we got hooked up with the John Wayne room. The John Wayne room was the size of maybe three standard hotel rooms together which gave us lots of room to get our stuff together for the hike the next day. After dropping off our stuff and relaxing for a quick minute, we went into "town" and got a quick bite to eat. We went to the Lone Pine Smokehouse and filled up on BBQ in hopes that it'd knock us out at such an early time of day (5pm) knowing that we'd be waking up around midnight to start getting ready to leave for the hike. It was good. I'd go back.

The bbq didn't work. I was able to stay asleep for maybe an hour before I woke back up and excitement took over. That, mixed with a full moon rise and a cotton candy sky and I was restless. I kept trying to fall asleep, but sure enough, 12am rolled around and I was still up and at that point it was time to get ready. We were all packed so we just needed to get dressed, put in contacts, brush our teeth etc. The drive to the Whitney Portal took about 20-30 minutes from out hotel. The moon was full and so even without getting adjusted to the nighttime, you could easily make out the mountain ranges we were driving up to. Frequently, little jack rabbits would run out in front of the car and Brian would quickly break, each time giving the rest of us a friendly wake up call in the car. Rather quickly we ascended about 5,000" to the trailhead parking lot. I made not of the temp at our hotel and at the time we got to the trailhead and it had dropped from 52 to 37 and had gotten substantially more windy.

With the current temperature situation, we were quick to get started, but just as quickly, I realized that my headlamp was not working. It seemed that water had gotten into the battery terminal and coroded some of the medal. So, I was quickly relegated to iPhone LED which worked surprisingly well aside from the fact that I had to hand hold it the entire time. My outfit consisted of a Lulu Lemon undershirt, tasc Performance 1/4 zip, and a North Face shell for the top, a Smart Wool base layer and Mountain Hardwear pants for the bottom, and Smart Wool socks and waterproof Sorel hiking boots and I was more than comfortable as long as I didn't stop for lengthy periods of time before the sun came out.

Because we started hiking at 1:30am, we were found ourselves hiking in the dark for several hours until about 4:45am with only our headlamps and the light of the full moon. If you haven't done any night hiking, it's really a thrill especially during either a full moon when you can see just about everything or during a new moon when you can see all of the stars. Another benefit of hiking in the dark on hikes that aren't loops is that when you come back in the other direction when it's bright out, it's like an entirely new experience which is cool.

We encountered several areas where we had to cross water.

The full moon lit up the entire canyon.

Several hours in, night turned to twilight and twilight turned to dawn.

First light.

We stop to take in sunrise.

With the sun at our backs, we get our first sign of the infamous "chute".

We reached Trail Camp right around sunrise and were met by several unhappy campers who had slept through a freezing night and were just happy the sun was back.