In 2022, I scaled Mount Marcy, the very best peak in New York State, with my son. That weekend, ecstatic, we appeared for an additional journey. Some Google looking revealed that Mount Whitney, the very best peak within the decrease 48, was not out of attain for amateurs like us. I proclaimed that he and I, together with my daughter, would climb it in 2023. In the long run, neither of them may make it. Lucy didn’t want a lot convincing to affix me. Climbing had introduced exhilarating new challenges and triumphs — and Mount Whitney promised these on a a lot better scale.
However solely a brief approach up, my lofty ambitions met snowy actuality.
We’d been informed to anticipate loads of snow increased up, however we didn’t anticipate any this low. I had packed an ice ax and crampons, on the sturdy urging of the homeowners of a gear retailer in Lone Pine, the unpretentious city on the foot of the mountain the place most individuals put together for the climb, however I didn’t need to use them so early. It will take me without end — and we didn’t have without end. We had lower than 24 hours.
Problem accepted
Till I researched the journey, I had by no means heard of the naturalist John Muir and his great line “The mountains are calling and I need to go,” or identified that a lot of the water for Los Angeles, about 200 miles south, comes from this a part of the Sierra Nevada.
Mount Whitney, with an elevation of 14,494 ft, was named for Josiah Dwight Whitney, a Northeasterner and Harvard professor who headed the California Geological Survey, and its first recorded climbing, by three Lone Pine residents, was in 1873. It’s dwarfed by Denali, in Alaska, the very best peak in the US, at over 20,000 ft. However Mount Whitney presents one thing Denali doesn’t: It’s attainable to hike up and down in in the future. The round-trip trek, which mountain guides describe as difficult — much more so with snow and ice — totals about 22 miles, a lot of it at excessive altitudes.
The U.S. Forest Service runs a lottery every February for each day-use and in a single day permits to go up Mount Whitney from Might 1 to Nov. 1. The company limits the variety of day hikers to 100 for each midnight-to-midnight interval to keep away from overcrowding on the path.
