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.