But the altitude sickness caused enough of a delay that it prevented me from summiting. And while I was sick, I was truly incapacitated. There wasn't a question of working through it and taking the pain, I seriously had no choice but to drop elevation quickly.
Sounds disturbingly familiar, Tom. What was that old Yogi Berra line - "deja vu all over again"? When AMS jumped me on the switchbacks in 2009, it was all I could do to safely put one foot in front of the other while descending from 13,000' to Outpost Camp. Worst headache I've ever had, roiling nausea that made me sweat, dizziness, incapacitating tiredness out of the blue - but more sleepiness than anything else. I just wanted to lay down and go to sleep and didn't much care what happened afterwards. It took every bit of determination I could summon to stay on my feet and keep going down rather than plopping down and taking an extended time-out from reality. Once I was at about 10K' - Outpost Camp - the symptoms all receded, just leaving me feeling washed out. By the time I was back at the Portal, enough normalcy had returned that I could actually handle a burger and a beer.
From the onset of the very mild headache at Trail Camp to the full-blown range of AMS symptoms was about an hour, and maybe 800 feet of elevation. I could not believe I actually had AMS after hopping around fourteeners in Colorado a couple of years before without a hint of a problem. It opened my eyes, though, and made me research the why of it. It didn't take long to realize that sleeping in Lone Pine had been the key mistake, even though I was dayhiking to around 12K' in the days before Whitney. Be-bopping around at 13K' and 14K' in Colorado while staying in a hotel still involves sleeping around 8000 feet - you would have to try really hard
not to sleep high that deep in the Colorado Rockies. That's why the next trip to the Sierra last month involved sleeping a few nights in Mammoth before heading up the Whitney trail. I can't over-emphasize the importance of getting at least 2 nights' sleep at elevation before trying to tackle 14,000 feet.
