After months of planning and eager anticipation, I commenced my assault on the mountain on Sunday 10/4, sadly my timing could not have been worse but I had little choice having come all the way from The Land Down Under.
I believe the summit forecast indicated snow up to 6-8 inches for Sunday thru Tuesday, that forecast proved to be a gross underestimation.
I comfortably made Trail Camp by 11:00am with light snow falling and a great many hikers coming down.
By the time I had set up my tent the weather had really set in and the visibility was dropping rapidly as the snowfall intensity increased.
I retreated to my tent, believing that the storm would be short lived and that I would make my summit attempt on Monday.
How wrong I was. The snow storm continued for the next 30 hours, pounding my tent and dumping close to 3 feet of snow around trail camp and completely obliterating the trail. I was confined to my tent for close to 40 hours until the weather abated around 3:00am Tuesday. My Mt Whitney attempt was over and I freely admit to being seriously concerned for my safety as I lay huddled in my sleeping bag.
I had thought I was alone at Trail Camp, however upon leaving my tent on Tuesday morning, I noticed another tent some distance away so I waded over thru the thigh deep powder to find another hiker in the same predicament as me, having come down from the JMT on Sunday night. He advised that some SAR people were on the way up.
Around 11:00 a group of hikers came into camp using a GPS to trail find and I decided the time had come for me to get off the mountain. Luckily I could use their footprints to find my way down although it was heavy going in the deeper snow.
What I have learned from this exercise is that I was right to stay holed up in my tent for 48hrs, however stressful that was, rather than try and blunder down the trail in impossible conditions, that could have ended very badly.
So my Mt Whitney summit attempt remains unfulfilled but I have learned a great deal from the experience and can only speak highly of all the fellow hikers I met on the trail.
Perhaps I will get another shot someday but it is a long way from Sydney and I am not getting any younger!
