In 2022, I scaled Mount Marcy, the best peak in New York State, with my son. That weekend, ecstatic, we looked for an additional adventure. Some Google searching revealed that Mount Whitney, the best peak within the lower 48, was not out of reach for amateurs like us. I proclaimed that he and I, together with my daughter, would climb it in 2023. In the tip, neither of them could make it. Lucy didn’t need much convincing to affix me. Hiking had brought exhilarating recent challenges and triumphs — and Mount Whitney promised those on a much greater scale.
But only a brief way up, my lofty ambitions met snowy reality.
We’d been told to expect a variety of snow higher up, but we didn’t expect any this low. I had packed an ice ax and crampons, on the strong urging of the owners of a gear store in Lone Pine, the unpretentious town on the foot of the mountain where most individuals prepare for the climb, but I didn’t need to use them so early. It would take me ceaselessly — and we didn’t have ceaselessly. We had lower than 24 hours.
Challenge accepted
Until I researched the trip, I had never heard of the naturalist John Muir and his wonderful line “The mountains are calling and I have to go,” or known that much 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 feet, 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 is dwarfed by Denali, in Alaska, the best peak within the United States, at over 20,000 feet. But Mount Whitney offers something Denali doesn’t: It is feasible to hike up and down in someday. The round-trip trek, which mountain guides describe as difficult — much more so with snow and ice — totals about 22 miles, much of it at high altitudes.
The U.S. Forest Service runs a lottery each February for each day-use and overnight permits to go up Mount Whitney from May 1 to Nov. 1. The agency limits the variety of day hikers to 100 for each midnight-to-midnight period to avoid overcrowding on the trail.
