And now for something completely different: climbing Mount Whitney

Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States at 14,508 feet — and in the height of summer (or, tbh, a lot of the year during this latest great California drought) it is a walk up climb! But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, exactly.

I researched extensively before embarking on this climb, and there were still several things that came as a surprise. Here, I’ll summarize the details that you can find scattered widely around the internet, describe how the hike went for me and my climbing partners, and note a few things that I didn’t see anywhere. Plus, of course, stay true to my signature brand of making everything about climate change 🙂

First, the common knowledge/need-to-know:

• You need a summit permit and a backcountry permit (these come together). This means entering a lottery long before the climb via recreation.gov. Side note: recreation.gov is an incredibly well-designed and functional website, in stark contrast to everything else online related to the National Park Service and federal land. More on that later.
• This hike is super long. You need to train. Apparently in SoCal that means Mount Baldy (I wouldn’t know; I avoid SoCal). In the Bay Area, that means the long routes on Mount Diablo.
• You should aim to be off the summit by noon, which means starting at 4am at the latest. Thunderstorms come through on many summer afternoons, and you do not want to be above 13k feet when they do! It’s super exposed and very dangerous.
• The elevation (both the number of feet climbed/descended and the sheer altitude) is no joke. Most people who climb Mount Whitney live near sea level. If you want a good shot at summitting, you need to acclimate, which means spending a few days at 8k feet or doing the main climb over the course of multiple days. If you start vomiting, descend immediately. You can probably push through a headache, but if it keeps getting worse, turn around. If you don’t feel better when you reach the trailhead at 8k feet, have breathing problems, or are acting drunk, you should go straight to the hospital in Lone Pine — altitude sickness that doesn’t resolve when you descend it probably going to keep getting worse and you need treatment.
• You can camp at the Whitney Portal Campground a mile away from the trailhead, but you need to book ahead. There are also some walk-in campgrounds even nearer to the trailhead, and I even saw people sleeping in their cars in the trailhead parking lot (though the signs imply you aren’t supposed to). These campground have bear boxes, drinking water, and pit toilets, but not showers. You can pay for a shower at the Whitney Portal Store, which is right by the trailhead (its website suggests it’s in the town of Lone Pine, but it’s not).

• Because you have to start before sunrise, you’ll require a headlamp. Make sure it’s charged and you have spare batteries. At full power, some headlamps only last a couple hours, and you’ll use that all on the way up! Hopefully you’ll be down by sunset, but if you’re not, you don’t want to be without light.

Now, the things I wish I knew:

• Once you win the lottery and confirm that you’ll be using your permit, you are not done! Between 2 and 14 days before your climb, you have to check in, receive the actual permit, print it out, and sign it. They do not make this easy or obvious. This website suggests you can get it at a number of ranger stations and any time on the day before, but this is not true: only the Lone Pine Ranger Station could process requests, and it must be claimed by 12pm the day before your climb (not 4pm, when they close). We called probably 40 times and emailed a dozen times in order to get our permit sent to us. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but be prepared to have to really hassle them.
• The campsites are very confusing! Whitney Portal is actually two different campgrounds — Mount Whitney Group and Mount Whitney Family. You might have to check both to find your site. There wasn’t any clear indication when I booked the campsite, but perhaps sometimes it is clear.
• You must use WAG bags to pack out solid human waste. There are too many people and not enough soil to rely on decomposition. These are pretty gross and one of ours was defective (which was super gross). They provide them in a dispenser at the trailhead, but make sure you bring more than you think you need since you may have to use multiple for a single incident. You’ll probably be on the trail for 15+ hours, so don’t count on being able to hold it.
• There are a couple places where the trail is hard to follow, mostly within the backpacker campgrounds. It’s not a big deal–you’ll find it again–but be aware that if you just blindly follow the most obvious track you’ll end up in someone’s campsite, not on the trail. Having GPS helps a lot with this.
• The water along the trail is much more accessible in the afternoon when the remaining snow is melting than in the morning. I saw reviews on AllTrails that mentioned water on the 97 Switchbacks, but that was only true on our descent, not our ascent. We were very happy that we had refilled at the lake at Trail Camp. On that note, use a pump water filter–the water is pretty shallow and filing a filter bottle would have been tricky! Since there are so many people and animals up there, you really do want to filter the water.
• The trail is definitely not 20.9 miles, the way AllTrails claims it is. I’m not sure how long it actually is, but in our little group we had four recording devices and all got over 23 miles (and as high as 25). It doesn’t really matter, but it’s good to know.

Our climb:

I climbed in a familiar hiking group — we’ve been on lots of long hikes together, so we knew we could tolerate each other for many sore hours on the trail.

We found out in April that we had won the lottery for a Wednesday one-day summit attempt in July and began training immediately. At that time, we were competent and frequent casual hikers, but we rarely did more than 10 miles in a day. We knew we had to pick it up!

We got very familiar with the golden hills and empty reservoirs of Northern California this spring, views that we’d normally expect in October, not May. It was stark and made the drought feel very real.

Our training hikes were as follows, intermixed with lengthening runs from 2-3 miles to 8-11 miles a couple times a week.

April: Rose Peak

May: Mount Diablo

June: Shadow, Garnet, and Thousand Island Lakes

Side note: Shadow/Garnet/Thousand Island Lakes is incredible and you should totally do it.

We were supposed to climb Mount Shasta up this route on July 4th, but there was a wildfire and we could not. California’s fire season is starting earlier and burning hotter than ever before! Climate change ruins the party again.

For the actual Mount Whitney climb, we headed to altitude on a Sunday. We drove from the Bay Area to Yosemite, summitted Mount Dana that evening, and slept at 8k feet in Mammoth Lakes on Sunday and Monday nights.

Mount Dana is a 5.5 mile round trip that climbs 3000 feet over a pretty rough scramble. It’s the second-highest mountain in Yosemite National Park. We completed it in 3.5 hours and managed to top out 13,000 feet after driving from sea level. I think this was a great test of our fitness, tolerance for higher altitude, and ability to follow alpine trails. Several Mount Whitney climb advice websites mentioned Mount Dana as a good acclimation hike, and that certainly seemed to be true for us!

As we drove through Yosemite, we passed a wildfire — complete with a bunch of signs telling us not to report. The road was down to one lane because the fire was right next to the highway over Tioga Pass, smoldering in the underbrush. It was likely a controlled burn.

Yosemite is actually really good about forest management! Better than most of the rest of California (and the west in general), having done controlled burns for decades. This means that, though fires come through the park many times every year, they are rarely as destructive as they are in the rest of the state (though the smoke still makes the park inaccessible at times, as we learned last year–see pictures below).

On Tuesday, we drove down the highway to Mount Whitney. The mountains are gorgeous from the eastern side! While they build up kind of gradually from the west, from the east they are stark and sheer and impressive.

The hillsides in the brief eastern foothills are stained with fire suppressant and scorched trees. It’s clear the fire suppressant worked, though — on either side of the red swaths of powder, the trees stood healthy and alive.

The Whitney Portal Campground, though confusing, is gorgeous. I’d have liked an extra day to hang out, explore, and do a shorter hike or two. Alas, we are limited by vacation days.

We were in bed by 8:30pm but didn’t fall asleep until midnight, alas. One of our party saw a bear in our campground! Definitely make sure you use the bear boxes.

We awoke at 2:30am, exhausted but excited. After eating oatmeal, drinking coffee, and packing up camp, we drove a mile to the trailhead, deposited our remaining food in the trailhead bear boxes, and hit the trail. It was 3:30am and many people were already climbing ahead of us.

The first two hours (and four miles) felt like they didn’t even count — we were in complete darkness! By 5:30am the sun started to rise. By 6, we had an absolutely spectacular view and stopped for a snack. We were marveling at how our bodies had no idea what time it was and we had no idea how much food to be eating or water to be drinking.

We spent an hour at the halfway point of the ascent laying on rocks sunbathing. Smoke had begun to roll in from fires in Nevada and we could feel it in our lungs. The valley grew obscured and the bright morning felt like it was fading behind the familiar tide of smoke, but then the wind shifted, whipping down over the peeks and clearing out the bowl. When we set off uphill again, the air was clear.

It took an hour to traverse the infamous 97 switchbacks. I counted 105. Then it took another hour to cover a bit more elevation change, putting us at about nine miles in and at the point where we met the John Muir Trail.

This is also when we could see the view over the mountains looking west. We crested the saddle and set off along the ridge, with two miles and a lot of scrambling to reach the summit. These miles were the slowest going of the whole route with sweeping views off to our left and a slope up to the actual heights of the row of mountains to our right.

We reached the summit around 11am. It was a little anticlimactic, honestly — a wide, gently-sloping expanse up to the sheer cliff that marked Mount Whitney’s prominent profile. It was impossible to tell how iconic the location was: from up there, our surroundings looked nothing like they did from below.

Some other hikers had helpfully left a variety of Mount Whitney signs at the summit and we posed for many pictures holding them. This one in particular had the altitude wrong by a few feet–it should’ve said 14,508 feet! But I love how vast the mountains look behind me in this picture.

The clouds began to gather, as they often do around that time of day. They remained bright and fluffy, so we reclined, called our parents, and ate a lunch of tuna and bread and cheese. That’s right–there was cell service! Both TMobile and AT&T had service at the summit, though neither did throughout the rest of the hike (TMobile’s in the mountains was, in general, very bad).

By 12:30, we started back down. We probably spent too long at the summit: general advice is to spend as little time about 14,000 feet as you can manage to minimize your chance of negative altitude impacts. We all felt totally fine. I think we had a combination of good luck and plenty of time to acclimate.

The switchbacks felt interminable on the descent. I ran out of water and was desperate for the stream at the halfway point, but we encountered a much higher-altitude stream on the switchbacks that hadn’t been there four hours earlier! It was near freezing and incredible.

By 4pm, we were more than halfway down and lagging. We thought the thrills of the hike were over and there was only drudgery ahead.

But then we emerged into the forest we had been unable to see on the ascent! Sparse, twisted alpine trees rose up around us; streams spread into marshes; the air smelled amazing. It was idyllic and beautiful (and pine needles were a wonderful relief after so many miles on granite).

At last, we returned to the trailhead at 6pm. Some ultra marathoners completing a 135-mile run from Death Valley were arriving at their finish line there, too, which made us feel like we had no excuse being tired. Still, we drove straight to a pizza restaurant before going to bed and embarking on a 7.5-hour drive home the next day.