In 2022, I climbed Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York State, with my son. That weekend, ecstatic, we sought out another adventure. Some Googling revealed that Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48, was not out of reach for hobbyists like us. I proclaimed that he and I, along with my daughter, would climb it in 2023. In the end, neither of us made it. Lucy didn’t need much convincing to join me. Hiking had brought exciting new challenges and triumphs—and Mount Whitney promised these on a much grander scale.
But just a little further up, my lofty ambitions met snowy reality.
We had been told to expect a lot of snow up high, but we didn’t expect this low. I had packed an ax and crampons, at the strong urging of the owners of a tackle shop in Lone Pine, the unassuming town at the foot of the mountain where most prepare for the climb, but I didn’t want to use them so early. It would take me forever — and we didn’t have forever. We had less than 24 hours.
Challenge accepted
Until I researched the trip, I had never heard of naturalist John Muir and his wonderful line “The Mountains are calling and I must go,” or knew that much of the water for Los Angeles, about 200 miles south, comes from this place. of the Sierra Nevada.
Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet, was named for Josiah Dwight Whitney, a Northeasterner and Harvard professor who headed the California Geological Survey, and its first recorded ascent, by three Lone Pine residents, was in 1873. It is dwarfed by Denali, Alaska, the highest peak in the United States, at over 20,000 feet. But Mount Whitney offers something Denali doesn’t: It’s possible to hike up and down in one day. The round trip, which mountain guides describe as challenging — even more so with snow and ice — totals about 22 miles, much of it at high elevations.
The US Forest Service is holding a raffle each February, for both day and overnight permits to climb Mount Whitney from May 1 to November 1. The service limits the number of day hikers to 100 for each midnight to midnight period to avoid overcrowding the trail.
