The Highest Guys in California: Taking The Mountaineer’s Route Up Mount Whitney

Lonely At The Top: The Whitney Summit

    A pair of headlights sweeping through the desert night.

    It was around 10 p.m. down in Badwater Basin, but when I touched my fingers to the passenger-side window, I could still feel the tremendous heat outside — throbbing off the rocks, the salt flats, the hills.    This was Death Valley, California.

    The bottom of the basin reaches 285 feet below sea level, making it the lowest point in the United States. It also has the highest recorded temperature for the nation, some argue for the world. Though the Valley is an impressive place, it was not the end goal for Andrew and me. That goal lay 80-some odd miles to the west to Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States at 14,500 feet.

    Suddenly, a beige form slunk out from behind some sagebrush. Andrew slammed the brakes just in time to avoid flattening a coyote. The phantom animal faded back into the dark and we drove on.  When we finally reached the turnoff for the hike, we were the only car in the lot. A balmy wind greeted us as we stepped out and walked down the wooden steps to the lowest point in North America.

    It was impossible to make out the entire sweep of the landscape, only the small zone of illumination within my headlamp beam. The light did reveal brittle salt ridges. I bent down with a wet finger and tasted the brine, which had traveled along miles of water courses that ended not in the sea but in this great evaporating pan, where the liquid surrendered to the atmosphere.

    We walked out a ways and looked out over the far reaches of the flat plain. This was good enough. Soon enough we were back in the car, heading west and gaining elevation. We slept in the foothills of the Sierras, 4,000 feet above sea-level, beneath a blanket of stars.

Starting Out In Sleet

    Sixteen hours later, Andrew and I were at 8,000 feet sitting at parking lot to the Mount Whitney trailhead. A windblown torrent of sleet slapped at the windshield; neither of us were eager to get out of the car to begin packing our stuff again. The storm had come right as we were getting organized and I had hastily thrown a tarp over my clothes to keep them dry. It seemed clever at the time, but as I sat in the car, I realized that it was probably inadequate protection. Sure enough, I went outside to find that the water running down the asphalt had gotten underneath the plastic and soaked through my warm mittens.

    Eventually, the slushy flakes subsided enough so that we were willing to step outside. We finished packing our stuff and started up the trail. May was still early in the season for Whitney climbers so there wasn’t much company.

    We had opted to take the Mountaineer’s Route up the mountain instead of the more popular Mount Whitney Trail. Our campsite would be at Upper Boyscout Lake, at the edge of tree line, which would help us acclimate and prepare for a tough push to the summit the next day.

    The Mountaineer's Route would be shorter, but it would also be steeper and more technical. Both of us had crampons and one ice axe apiece, which we would use to hack our way to the summit. We would also have to blaze our own trail for the final section of the climb, which is why I had brought a compass and a topographic map.

    The hike started easily enough with a crushed gravel path leading up through the towering sequoia stands which were some of the tallest trees I’d ever seen. A neat series of switchbacks tamed the ruggedness of the mountain for us. 

    The cold white clouds hung low over our heads, concealing Whitney and its neighboring peaks. Every now and then, the wind would shift them slightly, enough so that we would get a glimpse through to the snowy realms above.

    After about a mile, we reached the place where the Mountaineer’s Route split off from the main path. A sign warned us that the route was not for the novice hiker and even someone who had reached the top via the Mount Whitney Trail before might not be prepared for the challenge of the Mountaineer’s Route. The mountain would punish the overconfident, it said.

Sequoias and snow seen near Lower Boy Scout Lake on Hike Down 

    Sure enough, the new path proved harder. There were slippery boulders to scramble and close brush on either side of the trail that slapped us with freezing droplets. Sometimes we lost the trail and had to stumble through the wet vegetation to find our way again. We crossed and re-crossed the stream running down the center of the valley, then started a steep climb next to the edge of a cliff. We grasped at slick handholds and wriggled worm-like up six-foot ledges as the valley dropped away into foggy gloom.

    The snow started up again by the time we reached Lower Boy Scout Lake, so I put the snow pants back on and then my rain jacket over my parka. A man and a woman were making their way back down. They decided they didn’t have the gear to make the climb in this weather.

    It was maybe two more miles until we reached Upper Boyscout Lake at 11,500 feet. Deep snow drifts waited on the way between, followed by a series of cairns leading up a stream. The daylight was almost faded by the time we got there and the temperature was dropping fast.

    We pitched tent amidst the boulders near the lakeshore. There weren’t any good places to set up stakes, or trees to tie off to, so I pinched the tent walls down with heavy rocks. Lord knew we needed them in the high wind. Andrew spent a few minutes looking for a sheltered spot for dinner and found a tiny alcove beneath one of the larger boulders. It was just enough protection against the whipping flakes so that we could light the stove and enjoy some dehydrated potatoes and cheese, spooning it up quickly with frozen hands.

    Afterwards, we clambered into the tent, into our sleeping bags and rest for the summit push on the next day.

Camp at Upper Boy Scout Lake

    We got up at around 5:30 in the morning and cooked up a monster batch of oatmeal before we started up the trail.

    There were snowshoe tracks through the powder, a big help considering how difficult it was to spot the cairns that marked the way. After about an hour of hiking we found the two hikers who had made the tracks. The two were breathing hard. They had come from Arizona and spent one day at 7,000 feet before climbing to Upper Boy Scout Lake. They still hadn't acclimatized to the thin air.

    “I can feel my heart beating in my eyeballs,” one of them told me.

My heart was not beating in my eyeballs, but I did feel that I was working harder than normal to catch my breath, trudging through the snow, sometimes falling in thigh-deep.

    There were no more tracks after we passed the Arizonans. It was up to us to navigate the snowy boulders ourselves on what we thought was the trail. We had a couple of false starts and plenty of doubt, but eventually we reached Iceberg Lake. The summit of Whitney was still out of sight, lost in the clouds

    Now things would get interesting. We were at 12,500 feet with 2,000 more feet to climb to reach the summit. To get there, we would have to ascend one of several couloirs — the steep, snow-filled ditches— in between the even-steeper rock faces. The question of which couloir we should climb was harder to determine, especially since the summit was out of sight. I spent some time squinting at my map and compass before I decided on a route that lay on the far side of the lake. It wasn’t exactly where I thought it would be based on the map, but the other climbs seemed too steep.

We ate some lunch before we started. Soon enough, the Arizonans trudged in. They told us that the correct route was further to the left. It was steep, but that was what we brought the axes and crampons for.

    They started up the ascent themselves, becoming small and dimmer as they reached the edge of the clouds. Andrew and I put our crampons on and followed.

Iceberg Lake

    The way was steep, but not quite as steep as it had looked from the lakeshore. The difficult part was trudging up the knee-deep powder, and all the loose stone underfoot. Each footstep would roll some of these rocks and dislodge a bit of snow. We leaned in on our axes for support, panting in the thin atmosphere.

    After a couple hundred feet of climbing, we passed the Arizonans, who were moving at a glacial pace now. Things got steeper as we entered the couloir and a cold wind gusted down between the stone walls, throwing the chill air into our faces. I was more than warm with effort.

    The walls on either side of us and the clouds blocking the view up above, reinforced a sense of tunnel vision. There was little on my mind beside the dumb effort of lifting my feet up, trudging toward the unseen goal. The altitude made me feel a little stupider, a little clumsier, a little weaker. Now and then I would stumble on the lose rock and fall a couple steps backward. I found myself stopping often with my heart racing, resting my weight atop my axe.

    By the time we reached the top of the couloir, Andrew and I were both exhausted. There was still perhaps 800 more feet to the top, which was still invisible in the clouds. We were out of the steep couloir but there were plenty of large boulders to navigate around, as well as some steep rock faces up above that we probably didn’t want to climb. Finding the summit would require a bit of compass navigation combined with some educated guesswork. We opted to take a traverse instead of going straight up, a choice that found us going over some sketchy snow crossings where a misstep could have meant a long tumble.

Ascending The Couloir

    We were a couple of hundred feet from the top of a ridge and already at our designated turnaround time. The snow, which had taken a brief respite when we topped out of the couloir, began to fall with renewed vigor.

    “Either this is it, or were not going to make it,” I told Andrew.

When I finally reached the top of the ridge, I found a set of footsteps in the snow. It could only have been someone hiking along the Mount Whitney Trail. I felt a combination of relief and satisfaction. The summit couldn’t be far from here.

    Sure enough, the summit hut emerged from the whirling flakes about a quarter-mile later. The boulder pile nearby marked the top of the mountain. There wasn’t much of a view for us to see through the snow, but who cared? We were the highest guys in California! We were also the highest guys in 48 other states, all except Alaska.

Ice Axe Dance At The Top

    Unfortunately, there wasn’t too much time to savor the moment. We made a quick stop at the summit building to sign the log, then wound back down through the boulders to the culoir. It was slow, tricky business to avoid slipping on the rocks. I ended up skidding multiple times on the way down to Iceberg Lake despite my careful steps. It looked like the Arizonans had decided to turn around much earlier, and we never saw them again.

    We reached my tent by late afternoon and decided that we could hike the rest of the way to the trailhead before it got dark out. We’d had our fun up there and now it was time to get low again.

    The clouds were breaking up overhead, revealing the blue sky. The snowy peaks blazed in the last light of the day. Below the snow lay the green band of giant sequoias, drinking up the meltwater, hanging on in that perilous zone between tundra overhead and desert below. The rain shadow cast by the High Sierra made for the dry hot mountains to the east, Death Valley too. One climate fed into the other, required the other. Each offered its own mysteries and fascination to me as I looked down upon the multifaceted landscape.

    It was all there.

By Rope And By Swim: Descent of Subway Canyon

The author, helmeted, strikes a defiant pose in the middle of Subway Canyon

They had dry bags. We had garbage bags. They had wetsuits. We had rain jackets and fleeces.

The two brothers Andrew and I met in the parking lot looked a lot better prepared to go through the freezing pools of Subway Canyon than we did.

Hypothermia is not the first thing that comes to mind when most people think about Zion National Park in the southwest corner of Utah. More likely they think about the park’s desert landscape, the bleak edifices of stone baking in the sun. But there is cold there too. When we visited in May, the park still held snow patches in its 8,000-foot highlands. The meltwater inevitably channeled down the drainage into the canyon where Andrew and I planned to go, and would force us to wade or swim to get through. We wrapped our clothes in not one, but two garbage bags to keep them dry (the bags reeked with an industrial-sweet odor.) Hopefully, everything would be dry when we needed it to be.

Subway doesn’t just have cold swim sections, it also required that we bring rope for a couple of rappels off cliffs. The swimming and rappelling would make for a fun obstacle course provided that we didn’t freeze to death before we made it through.

Both the guidebook and the park ranger at the visitor’s center recommended wetsuits for anyone going through in the spring. The ranger didn’t stop us though. We might be in for a rough time, he told us, though he didn't think we were going to die.

We left Andrew’s car at the end of the canyon and then hitched our way toward the Wildcat Trailhead where our journey would begin.

We were about to start down the trail, when a rental car pulled into the parking lot behind us.

Two guys jumped out: brothers. Both looked very fit, had sun hats, high-performance outer-ware, and no shortage of confidence.

“Hey, are you doing The Subway,” one of them shouted.

“Yeah,” Andrew said.

“Oh cool,” the guy said. “Would you guys mind if we came with you?” It was almost a question.

He made his case quickly. They had food, water, rope and wetsuits. They had both tried to find the entrance to the canyon the day before, but had gotten mixed up on the directions and ended up wandering through the trees all day. Now they wanted another set of eyes to help them find their way, oh and a ride back to the trailhead too. We had a guidebook with us, so that put us a little ahead of the game.

The brothers offered to let us keep the rope Andrew was carrying in their car so that we can lighten the load.

Once we started down the canyon with one rope, we would have to stick together. I had some trepidation about this but we went with it.

Meanwhile, daylight was burning, so we saved the getting to know you stuff for the hike. As we scrambled down the trail, I learned that the brothers were from Manhattan, where they worked in radiology. When they weren’t scoring girls or hitting clubs they liked to go on adventures — places like Columbia, Central America and Rio where they went diving and explored caves. While Andrew and I were spending a month of tenting for free in National Forests and eating out of cans, these guys moved fast, flying into Vegas, getting the rental and staying in hotels. They’d also found a place that rented wetsuits, which was something Andrew and I might have considered.

Though I worried about the cold ahead of us, it was hard to imagine that while we were under the hot desert sun. Juniper and Pinyon pine trees grew out of the dry, rocky soil  and our footsteps sent up clouds of dust.

When I stopped to take a leak, a whiptail lizard raced out from behind a rock to drink from the warm stream. It skitted away just as quickly. Maybe the flavor wasn’t to its liking or maybe the towering biped that the liquid came from scared it off.

We stopped several times along the way to double check directions. It was easy to see how the brothers had become confused the day before. Eventually, we made it to an overlook where there was a steep, crumbly descent to the canyon bottom.

The creek was down there. It wasn’t a large flow of water, but in time, it had succeeded in carving through hundreds of feet of stone. The waters were dark, shaded by the canyon walls.

The first crossing

We took a rest by the edge of a murky pool. There was no way around so we would wade. One of the brothers offered me a bag full of watermelon slices.

“Here take some.”

I turned it down, perhaps unconvincingly.

“C’mon. It’s really good. I brought too much of it and it will go to waste.”

I grabbed a slice and savored the sugary liquid. It was good.

I turned toward the pool, steeling myself for the cold temperatures.

“Hey. You want to borrow my wetsuit top?” The brother extended the neoprene garment.

“Nah, I should be good,” I told him, thinking about all the pushups and profanity I would use to get warm on the  other side.

“Go ahead. Put in on. The wetsuit pants should be good enough for me.” I relented and put the top over. It was one of many shows of generosity that the brothers showed throughout the day, including sharing more food and inviting us to chill out at their hotel later on. By the time we finished the hike, one of the brothers was unsatisfied with the fit of his trail running shoes and told me I could have them. I took him up on the offer and they ended up being useful on several future hikes.

After I put the wetsuit on, I threw my rain jacket over it for an additional layer of warmth, took a breath and stepped in.

A knife of cold went up my leg as soon as it went through the water. I might as well have gone wading in a slushy. I kept moving forward: knee-deep, crotch-deep — yikes! At belly-depth, the water started getting shallower again

 I was good and cold when I reached the other side, watched as the brothers crossed, looking like Navy SEALs in the wetsuits and panama hats. We started moving again, warming our numbed legs with exercise. After a while, I felt the warmth come back and even started to appreciate the scenery of the canyon walls. Not long after, we came to a spot where a boulder all but a narrow passage in the canyon. Beyond that passage, there was our first rappel. It was only about 12 feet or so, but went past an overhang with a waterfall pounding next to us. We took our time going down the rope and landed in the water at the bottom. One of the brothers had forgotten his belay device and had to move down the rope barehanded.

Now I had a good chill going. It didn’t help that we might occasionally have to put a foot down into ankle-deep water to navigate the cobbles on the canyon bottom.

The big challenge was yet to come however. Suddenly the canyon narrowed abruptly between smooth stone walls, forming a narrow passage of deep water. Then the floor dropped away and there was a waterfall. There was no way around, no choice but to plunge on through. Fortunately there was an alcove with a ledge about halfway through the passage, a place to try and get warm before taking on the waterfall.

Another place to get cold
That first section was predictably hellish. The water got to chest deep and we thrashed our way through as quickly as possible. I clenched my jaw so hard that it ached. When we got to the alcove, Andrew and I tried to fight the cold with plyometric exercises. It helped some, but I was nowhere close to being warm.

Someone had laid a bolt for a rappel over the waterfall but we didn’t use it, opting jump down into the deep pool instead.

To do this, we would have to launch our packs over the edge first.

When my turn came, I was still shivering, dreading what would come next. I stepped up to the brink of the ledge and looked down into the wine-dark pool.

I chucked the pack, watched it float half-submerged away from the falls. I jumped after it. There was the feeling of being airborne, the plunge, the rush of water about my ears. Then it was stinging cold all over my body. I started swimming as soon as I popped to the surface, thrashing for the other bank. By the time that I had covered the 20-foot distance, I was dazed with cold, numb all over.

I saw Andrew run up to the other side of a river bank where a patch of sunlight shone down over the canyon walls. It looked like a good place to be, so I ran over there too. I stared up to the sun with eyes closed and extended my arms on either side so that I could receive the maximum solar output. No doubt, I looked like a supplicant in some ancient temple. It made sense to worship the sun. Right now, it was bringing me back to life.

The group of us took a long time here, replenishing ourselves with food and sunlight. A group of men and women came past us with go pro-helmets, talking in an Eastern European language. We would see them again not far down the canyon as we came to the final rappel.

No jumping this time. We had a good 20-foot rappel down another canyon wall into shallow water. We waited for the Europeans to descend their rope. Some of them had not done much of this before, and there was one young woman in the group who hesitated a long time before finally going over the edge.

“Ho! Ho! look at that!”

I looked. The two brothers were gathered at the edge pointing downward. Fortunately the woman on belay was too terrified at the descent to notice the brothers leering down her blouse.

At last, the Europeans moved on, and we were free to use the belay. I lowered myself to one shelf and then started kicking my way down the wall.

The final descent

Suddenly everything slipped. I felt a sting in my hand and jerked to a stop. I looked and realized that I was caught in the belay device. Either the rope slipped or I slipped up. Either was possible considering the rope may have been slick and because I’m still a novice at this stuff.

The pain hurt like hell, and I remembered a past climbing instructor telling everyone that once you make the mistake of letting your hand get too close to a belay device you are unlikely to repeat it.

I realized that I would need to yank my skin out from the belay device if I was going to reach the bottom. I gritted my teeth and jerked my hand. It broke free and I escaped with skin attached. I made it the rest of the way down to the pool unscathed. There was an ugly welt on my hand as an accusation of carelessness. The pain was one thing, but the possibility that I made such an amateur mistake rankled \ worse.

Everyone went over what might have gone wrong when we reached the bottom. There were no more technical challenges ahead of us, but there was plenty of hiking to do. I was eager to keep moving.

Walking down the river

In the miles ahead we took our time to enjoy the scenery of the canyon. The water got warmer too and we even ended up taking a dip voluntarily. The trail through the canyon was as beautiful as it was isolated and it was hard not to get taken up with the majesty of the high canyon walls, especially as the sun got lower in the sky.

I could see the brothers were enjoying it especially. Somehow, amidst all the Manhattan parties that they went to, living as big spenders, I got the sense that sharing these trips as brothers was more important to them than any of it. It was an escape from city pressures, their stressful jobs in radiology where they saw patients get bad news every day.

When they finished the canyon, the two of them would have another day to check out nearby Bryce Canyon and then they would have to drive back to Vegas, fly back to New York and where their jobs were waiting for them. Andrew and I would also drive toward Vegas, but we would keep going west, stop at the Red Rocks Canyon Nation Conservation Area to climb around and then proceed toward Death Valley and Mount Whitney.

For sure, Andrew and I came with a different style than the brothers, but I was glad that we ran into them. One way or another, I hope that we can all continue to have our adventures, along the paths we choose.

Leaving a Mark

When the ancient inhabitants of Horseshoe Canyon first began to decorate the redrock walls with images millennia ago, I wonder if anyone told them that they were wasting their time.

The time and energy needed to grind pigments, or to carve outlines into the desert varnish with a stone must have been a serious commitment considering that there would have been animals to hunt and crops that demanded cultivation. Whatever lives that the early people were able to build for themselves in that canyon could have been uncertain, under threat from a surprise drought or an act of aggression from neighbors. Nonetheless, the ancient artists continued to chip and paint the rock, leaving images of people, animals and spirits.

When I looked at those images on a hike through that canyon in the Utah desert thousands of years later, the stone left me with more questions about the people who marked it than they answered.

Clearly, animals were important to those people. Representation of game animals may have been a way that they tried to ensure a successful hunt in the future, or a way to document past triumphs.

Without a written language, the people within the canyon were limited in the level of detail that they could convey. They would have to make the pigments and brushes. They would have to re-imagine what the animals looked like and be responsible for creating their own arrangements that worked with the space that they had. 

Contrast that to our current, connected world where anything can be typed out, digitized, uploaded and made accessible to everyone. The only barrier between the thought and the creation is the time it takes to tap the touch screen a few times — trap the image with the camera and then post it.

Making paint or carving out an idea in the desert rock was much slower work that would require commitment. No doubt, those early artists would choose their panels carefully and think hard about what they wanted to depict.

Even with those efforts to express themselves, we are far removed from any complete understanding of those panels now. We can only take guesses about what the artists had intended. Should it be any different after we have spent our time on earth? What will all our Facebook posts, internet memes, videos and blogs tell future generations? No doubt, they will fade into obscurity as well, though I doubt I am making headlines for saying it.

I can only imagine that in their time, those ancient wall posts must have sparked pride in a people, perhaps a sense of identity. If even a small portion of the artists’ intentions had come across to me as the visitor in the canyon, then that artwork had preserved more of who the people were than any well-

cultivated field or successful hunt. What marks do we leave of ourselves today that people will best remember us by?

The fact that so much of the images’ meaning will likely be lost forever, tells me that we should try to make ourselves understood in the moment — future generations will look to others to speak for them, not us. If we are lucky, a few of them may look back at us and wonder. If people in the present hear our voices, they will have a better idea of what we mean.