Hi all, just back from an attempt via the Main Trail and wanted to add some more details.

We left Whitney Portal at 9am Sunday May 1 and made good progress to Mirror Lake where we filtered water. We Continued to climb up towards Trail Camp, but the going was much slower.

A little after coming up the switchbacks above Mirror Lake, the main trail switchbacks and climbs before traversing across a slope. On the left of this we saw footprints heading up a snow ramp to the left, but after having route finding issues last year we decided to follow the trail this time, which turned out to be a mistake.

After the switchbacks we encountered a slightly exposed traverse across a reasonably steep snow slope so had to pull out the ice axes and slowly make our way across.



A couple more hills and we rolled into Trail Camp about 4pm. Looking back down the slope we saw the same tracks we had seen earlier continuing all the way directly to camp.

As we got into camp it started snowing and we were unsure if we were going to be able to get up the chute the next day.



It snowed lightly all night but we woke at 4am to clear skies. We ate, kitted up and hit the trail at 5am. The snow was fairly deep across to the base of the chute, but there was a trail from UCSB group from a couple of days earlier. (I chatted to them at Whitney Portal and they made it to the base of the chute, but turned back due to concerns over the state of the chute).



At the start of the rock band in the chute, the trail ended, and the real work started. The snow ranged from shin to knee deep, and was super soft making progress slow and difficult.







After a long hard slog we reached Trail Crest about 9.15am. We ate and rested for a few minutes, trying to decide if we should continue. There was a ton of new snow over the back and half the group was pretty tired. I took a few steps to try and see if I could find any sign of the trail and sunk in up to my knees.



We decided that postholing all the way to the summit wasn't a smart plan, so called it good and headed back to camp.

The snow was so soft on the chute that glissading didn't really work (we just sank into the snow), so we plunge stepped our way back down to the top of the rock band. From there we had a little more luck with the glissading, but it wasn't any faster than walking down.

We refueled, broke down camp and made it out to Whitney Portal by 3pm, following the trail out of camp we had seen the day before.