Thursday Sept 9 2004

Drive up through Mohave, Barstow, that territory. There's something especially empty about that California quarter out there. You might be pulled over by Gary Busey. Creepy vibes. The once-verdant Owens Valley, and a puzzling brine swamp or something off to the right. That's Owens Lake.

Lone Pine (nice!) by mid-afternoon, ranger station with "poop" bags and "poop" instructions and funny bear warnings, views of Whitney looking unattainable.

Cast of four: Mike who I used to work with, true outdoor athlete, Robin his wife can totally keep up with him, Rob bear-like, and me.

We're going to hike all day tomorrow, camp at Trail Camp at 12000 feet overnight, summit and return the next day. We would be at the mercy of capricious weather. Always dangerous & unpredictable, and September is late in the season.

So we camped that first night at #43 in among many other campers and the bear-marked trees, one ear open for the bears, but mostly lulled by the sound of the brook. Robin quite skeptical about the small size of my pack. Endless futzing around with camping stuff, rustling plasic, ooo I hate that. Much talk about bears, their preferences, their needs, their habits, their hopes and dreams. "Walt is a machine."

This is my first night in my new yellow one-person tent, and it's a fabric coffin.

Friday Sept 10

Next morning, time to face the statistics:

Whitney Portal, trailhead and store: 8365
John Muir Wilderness Sign: 8500
Log crossing: 9400
Lone Pine Lake: 9850
Bighorn Park / Outpost Camp: 10365
Mirror Lake: 10640
Trailside Meadow: 11395
Trail Camp: 12000
Trail Crest: 13777
Keeler Needle: 14000
Mt. Whitney summit: 14494

Total elevation gain on the trail: 6135 feet. That's 40% of the height of the mountain from sealevel.

Total distance covered on foot: 21.4 miles.
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Compared to Phoenix hikes, Camelback is 2704 feet tall; elevation gain of 1300, 2.3 miles round trip. Squaw Peak is 2608 feet tall; elevation gain of 1190, 2.4 miles round trip. North Mountain is 2104 feet tall; elevation gain of 614 (from the park), 1.6 miles round trip. So the Whitney gain is like doing five Squaw Peaks, or 10 North Mountains.

The walk to the top of Whitney is 6135 feet, 1.1 miles of vertical gain, equivalent to climbing up the 110 stories of the World Trade Center five times, except you start from a point 3 times taller than Camelback's total height.

Bears wanted in this car. Splinters of safety glass on top.

Here's why.

This morning Rob hadn't slept well because of pillow issues. We fixed a quick breakfast with hot water.

After Rob's sudden and dramatic dislocated shoulder while putting on his pack, with a flourish of anger, which eliminated him from the hike, and a bit of fun re-distributing the common load from four packs into three, we started at 8ish up those endless switchbacks on the initial slope. The topology is teasing. I kept wanting to break off to the left. Mike and Robin advanced. I'm slow.

At the ten-log crossing, finally, it got pretty. Series of waterfalls, burbling pools, one pool as if glowing from within with blue-green-aquamarine. That hot pine smell, occasional whiff of sage, happy black squirrels, aggressive bluebirds.

Enjoyed a 20-minute lunch break at Outpost Camp. One nice moment, the first glimpse of the marshy Bighorn Park, framed with elephantine white boulders. Outpost Camp is a really idyllic-looking place to camp with a series of meadows and waterfalls and deep welcoming shade. Giant indestructible-looking grooved brick-colored trunks of Ponderosa pine, they look strong, even the fallen. And the futuristic Logans Run shock of the angled aluminum sun toilets, they look way out of place and smell evil. Welcoming, gorgeous, entrancing California neverland.

 

Then the trail again, Mirror Lake and another punishing 2000-foot gain from camp to camp, the most exposed and difficult and least rewarding stretch of trail. It's early afternoon now.

Thrilled to see the first patch of snow. Not sure why.

The hardest 1500 feet of elevation comes between the two camps, Outpost Camp at 10,300 and Trail Camp at 12,000. Just above the hypnotically beautiful Mirror Lake, you kiss the trees goodbye, and climb over a rough stretch of big, steep, exposed stones with large uneven steps.

So we all got up to Trail Camp in 5 hours 20 minutes. Our place to spend the night. The weather had been beautiful and kind up to this point. Now at Trail Camp we had the sweet relief of not walking, plenty of time to draw water and make dinner and set up camp and relax. That's when the trouble started.

Trail Camp is a rocky high-altitude bowl, like the moon. After all the exertion the first sensation was a black-and-white look, all crazy pointy fractals, thin oxygen, faster heartrate that prevented much sudden effort, slight confusion, dull persistent ache in the temples.

Unfriendly sun at high altitude. It made deep high-contrast shadows, like photographs of moon landings. The lack of vegetation and fractal shapelessness of the rocks made it impossible to gauge distance.

I didn't exactly know what to do with myself. I explored away from the others and made tea, which usually calms me down and cheers me up. Then I sat down and did a pack repair job, with needle and thread, and that helped me focus, to stay busy, a kinesthetic subroutine I hadn't called on for some time, but I was still dim-witted and anxious and worried about something.

Looking around at these 50 fellow hikers in their colorful balloon-like tents, a self-selected tribe, a community without - without anything. A 100% transient community packed in and packed out 40 pounds at a time. This tribe had a cultural vocabulary, we all look roughly alike, dress alike, talk in the same words about the same issues at the same time, think and step alike. Trail camp as an extreme and unique twisted community.

The lack of anywhere to go or anything to buy and the distance to medical attention began to make me preoccupied. If the weather turns bad it's not like you have anywhere to go or anywhere to hide. You don't. Good or bad, it's a long way down.

I talked to Mike but didn't make much sense. I had trained at altitude and expected and wanted a physical challenge, not a freakout. Headache wouldn't stop. Oh, and my ridiculous candy-apple-red Chinese sunglasses digging into the soft flesh above my ears. I didn't get permits and come all the way up here for a freakout.

Weird lighting effects as the sun went down, because this rocky bowl faces east you get an eerie long grey twilight, everyone destined for early bed. Robin and Mike retired into their tent and left me alone with a sense of tension.

A chilling lonliness surged up and I wanted to throw my head back and howl. Only embarrasment stopped me. Desolated. I wanted hot food. I was full of bad emotion looking for a rationale. I wanted to bolt downhill but wouldn't make it.

I could feel my choices narrow around me. Against my will I was channelled into the only way out of this situation, which was to lay down inside my yellow coffin-tent that I hated so much, gather up the unzipped mummy-bag for warmth, and just endure this. Couldn't zip up the sleeping bag around me, that was too claustrophic and caused real physical panic. It was still light, that grey eerie long twilight, and the temperature was starting to drop, and I wasn't sure I'd gotten enough calories for the night, for my mechanism to keep working.

Ah, my God, I started to panic. Couldn't do it. I got up, struggled out of the tent, sat on a rock and looked at nothing trying to identify my problem. These emotions didn't belong to me. Back inside.

I desperately needed space to stretch out. I just wanted a warm blanket. I got ahold of myself by thinking that it was a limited number of hours until 4:00, a small number of hours of waiting, and then I could verbally give up to Mike and make it back down the mountain. I just had to wait. It was a small number. I could wait that long. I took charge of my mechanism and slowed my heart rate.

Through the night, my eyes would flip open, and I'd laugh because it was probably not even 10 o'clock yet. Finally I slept for stretches and felt warm enough and okay enough to wait so I could give up.

 

Saturday Sept 11

At 4:20, Mike's voice woke me up, my mind snapped back into shape, just like that. Okay, time to summit.

We had a bright half-moon and Venus like an oncoming headlight, Milky Way unavoidable in your field of vision, satellites and shooting stars all over, close enough that you see them as rocks tumbling and heating up red and disintegrating. At least that's what I remember.

All unphotographable. The other hikers' tents were lit from inside, all colorful, also unphotographable but really beautiful.

News: Robin wouldn't be joining us. She'd stay here at Trail Camp and wait. Our party was down to two.

The sun came up as we tackled the, er, ah, the 99 switchbacks, Mike well ahead of me, lots of stops to pant. Not terrible if you turn your mind off. Everybody you meet on the trail - they earned their way up here. It takes commitment, planning, and strength to get there. So much of this task is mental, and hinges on the advice and support you get. Turns of phrase, good and bad, mentally repeated. Limits connected to expectations. Thank God for those old dudes on Mt. Humphreys who gave me reason not to be afraid of the 99 switchbacks. Given time, they're surmountable.

Trail Crest - first view off to the west

Many trail conversations on the way down, sensing the thicker oxygen, glad for it, not a smell, a strange richer feeling in the chest and lungs. And it's easier to focus. Any amount of physical suffering felt like a reward compared to getting back in that tent. Even now when I hit some kind of rough patch I think, "Hell, at least I'm not freaking out on Mt. Whitney."

Back at Trail Camp we met up with Robin again. She'd been freaking out all morning, waiting for us to descend, dislocated and disoriented, she and Mike couldn't really wait for me to break camp. She had to go. I didn't care, I knew exactly how she felt. As I broke camp a woman close by talked about how she'd been up seven years in a row and mentally couldn't do it this year. I swear it's the Twlight Zone up there at Trail Camp.

Around Mirror Lake, into the welcome shadows, back into the trees, thinking clearly again and enjoying it.

Down was good. Gravity. It wasn't until the climb down that I understood the more general topography. We'd hiked up and down a giant stair-step canyon, a set cascades and pools in the rocks, and enough accumulated soil downstream to support mountain laurel, marmots, a few tough bristlecone pines then stands of enormous red-trunked Ponderosa pine. Gorgeous.