Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Permit question for backpacking

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I just had a nice chat with Cindy on the permit number. For trailheads like Cottonwood Pass (and many others), there's no way to get a permit via recreation.gov because there's a locked gate involved or some other access difficulty that they want people to know about before booking. So if, for example, you want to go over Cottonwood Pass and are willing to deal with the 14 miles of road above the gate to get to the road's end, you can call them and convince them you're up for it (you're going to walk or bike the distance) and they'll give you a permit. (Steve's right!) Once the road opens, they put recreation.gov back in its normal mode.

As others here have said, there's a software enhancement in the works to make this whole process more automated, so that with an edit to a file containing trailhead-specific info (accessibility, quotas, etc.), what's visible on recreation.gov automatically changes to match that file. Now it apparently takes a non-trivial amount of manual editing in multiple places that doesn't always get done quickly or accurately.

I asked why there was no explicit description of road closures on the forest service web pages (e.g. https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/inyo/recreation/hiking/recarea/?recid=20812) or recreation.gov, and she said that a lot of people have edit-access to those alerts, and while there recently was a long list of road closures visible (I think she meant on recreation.gov), somebody decided it was too long and complicated and the list was replaced with a generic warning of "Check road closures and weather forecast before choosing a trip...." (In particular, those higher up the chain, the more "federal" people involved, as it were, sometimes make changes and those on the ground, in, say, California, aren't warned the changes are coming and just have to deal with the result.) She seemed to think that the upcoming software changes might help in that regard, but given how many people are involved, it's probably good to keep pursuing that road/access info elsewhere.

Cindy also said that the informal chatter around the office is that it probably won't be until late Summer that offices start to open and literal walk-ins begin again.

Finally, I asked her if there was anything I should broadcast about the whole permit process, and she said that one common problem is people are simply wrong about which trailheads lead to what destinations, so that if you get a permit to go to, say, Tyndall Creek (which I guess would be via Shepherd Pass), it's not going to give you easy access to Mt. Whitney. (Apparently someone recently suffered under that belief.)

More as it comes in...
Cheers, Rico