THE SHORT VERSION.
West Side Story (19-21): A spectacular backpacking trip, with a delightful side trip to the summit.
East Side Story (21/22): A stumble on the lower slopes, eventuating in (for C) a broken ankle and a 4 mile hobble (carrying her wag bag) to Whitney Portal; and (for me) a shameful failure to communicate with SAR.
THE LONG VERSION.
The team: C lives near LA and has for a while hankered to climb Whitney. I live near Detroit and am willing to try anything once. We're both of an age and apparent fitness level that most people we met on the trail would exclaim, "Good for you, ladies!" when we told them what we were up to.
Preparation and acclimatization: C is a runner, and spent some of the leadup to the trip at her family cabin around 7000 feet. I cycle, and flew into Reno early, so that I might spend 3 days sleeping in Lee Vining and hiking around Toulumne Meadows to acclimatize. (This was not a hardship.) We were diligent in our water drinking and took ibuprofen each am and pm. I had nothing I recognized as altitude issues; C appeared to have nothing significant. (The hedge is because C is British, and never complains. This will become relevant later.)
Day 1 (7/19): After a terrifying car shuttle---if I wasn't driving, I would have been on the floor of the car whimpering on the way up to Horseshoe Meadow---we spent the night of the 18th at Cottonwood Pass campground. The morning of the 19th we headed in over Cottonwood Pass, past Chickenspring Lake, and down down down to Rock Creek. Our original plan was New Army Pass, but we revised it after hearing reports (confirmed further down the trail, by people who had crossed NA pass the 18th or 19th) about a cornice blocking the trail there.
A flatlander born and bred, I was constantly amazed that the earth could do the sorts of things it was doing all around me as I made my way toward Rock Creek.
The Cirque Peak drainage had enough water to replenish your supplies, but not enough to get your feet wet as you stepped across it. Rock Creek was calf-deep on a short person, and moving fast enough that this short person was glad to have poles to brace herself as she forded it. (Various log crossings were available for showoffs. They were all way higher and narrower than I wanted to attempt with a full pack at the end of the day.)
Day 2 (7/20): From Rock Creek, over Guitar Pass, to the Tarns, a pair of little lakes just uphill from Guitar Lake, and the best campsite in the world. There's a choice point at Crabtree Meadow: follow the trail along the creek past the Ranger station, or go up and over a cruel little ridge on a pair of trails that formed two sides of the triangle completed by the creek trail. We took the long way to keep our feet dry. Shortcutters reported one ford along the shortcut. Overall, a magical day: an amazing variety of spectacular scenery, Mt. Whitney hoving into view at last, the trail easy to follow, other (but not too many other) hikers in giddy moods.
Day 3 (7/21): From the Tarns up up up to the junction with the spur trail to the summit, then down to Whitney Portal. The first bit entailed crossing several snowfields. None of them felt that exposed, and although it could take some attention to identify where the trail continued on their far sides, we never spent more than about 30 seconds seriously wondering. I traded down from a full pack to a day pack at the junction; C traded down to nothing. Between this, the fact that we'd been out long enough to be well-acclimatized, and what I think is the fact that the trail to the summit is distinctly less steep than the trail up to the junction from Guitar Lake, I experienced the summit spur as easy walking with HUGE payoffs -- the Windows afforded my first glimpses of the east side, and I was undeniably CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN!! (Remember, I'm from Detroit.) Alarmed by the dropoffs, C was more tense, but forging steadily on. The social character of the trail changed abruptly at the junction, with many more fellow-hikers, most of them making the sort of staccato progress that generates multiple encounters. This means we had frequent speculative conversations about the snowfield just before the summit, which we could see for a long time before we crossed it. We reached that snowfield in a state of high anxiety that dissipated as, micro-spiked for the first time, we crossed it on deep, level trenches. The broad summit plateau after the snowfield is probably the first place C had really relaxed since the switchbacks started after the Tarns.
We left the Tarns a bit before 7 and summitted around 10:30. After close to an hour taking pictures and generally enjoying the scene, we headed down. My impressions of the main trail accord with those registered by others who were on it at the same time. I found the first snowfield downhill from Trail Crest almost as terrifying as the Horseshoe Meadow road; C did not like it one bit. But moving deliberately, always keeping three points of contact, and refraining from looking down, we made it across.
Around 3 pm, we reached Trail Camp, where we found ourselves alarmed by the population density. While eating lunch #3, we both admitted to one another that we felt well capable of walking the rest of the way to Whitney Portal that day. So that's what we set out to do. Things were going swimmingly until a bit before Mirror Lake when, negotiating the last snowed-over switchback, C stepped on a loose rock and turned her ankle badly. Initially, she couldn't tell whether she could walk on it. After plying her with ibuprofen, and leaving her with her parka, a quart of water, and a pile of snow from the culprit bank to pack her ankle in, I ran her pack down to Outpost Camp while she assessed the situation. Because as I have said she is British and never complains, I was quite worried that she hadn't immediately insisted everything was fine. So when I ran into a friendly party we'd been leapfrogging since the summit junction, headed down for their Portal Store hamburgers, I asked them to send word that C had been hurt and might need help getting out, but that we were well-prepared to spend the night if help didn't arrive until the next day. I hadn't done my homework carefully enough to know to whom they should communicate this.
When I returned to C, she insisted everything was fine. She ace-bandaged her ankle, laced her boots up tight, and began hobbling downhill using her poles for support. This was around 5:30. At Outpost Camp, she expressed a wish to keep going. In my own experience, it's much easier to move on a sprained ankle immediately after you've sprained it than the next day. She'd been moving slowly but steadily. And I thought it was good to try to spare SAR having to deal with us. So (after some repacking to ensure that anything we'd need to bivouac we'd have in my pack) we moved on. But not before C, in an act of true Whitney heroism, retrieved her wag bag from her backpack. She insisted on carrying it herself, on the grounds that it would be "impolite" either to leave it with the rest of her things at Outpost Camp, which other people were using, or to have me carry it. This was around 6:30.
We made it out around 10. At first we were fairly cheerful, and were sending word down the trail that we were walking out after all. But then it got dark---we both had headlamps --- and lonely and a little sadistic. Neither of us had ever been up from Whitney Portal, so we didn't realize how far various pieces of trail furniture---signs welcoming you to wilderness areas and so on --- were from the trailhead. Seeing headlights on the Whitney Portal road, we spent about an hour thinking we were nearly out, only to round a corner and encounter the north fork of lone pine creek raging across the trail. Also, although C continued to insist she was fine and to refuse to relinquish her wag bag, she was in a lot of difficulty for the last stretch, even thinking near the end that she just couldn't do it.
But she did. I looked around the trailhead for someone to tell that we'd made it out, without luck. Also without luck, I studied our permit for information about how to contact SAR. Then I did something very shameful. I dropped the calling SAR project and took up the project of getting C down into the valley for medical attention. Taking up the second project isn't shameful, but dropping the first is: people's time and resources and safety were at stake. I think that at the time I was thinking that if we hadn't met SAR coming up, that meant that either the original message calling for help hadn't reached them or that the later messages saying we were walking out on our own had. That's obviously an extremely flimsy argument, and in retrospect I can't imagine why I didn't spend some of the three hours I was waiting in the South Inyo ER making a more systematic attempt to call off whatever rescue efforts might have been initiated.
X-rays revealed C's ankle to have an undisplaced fracture. The ER MD said walking out on it probably hadn't made anything worse.
Day 3 (7/21): While C cooled her damaged heels in Lone Pine, I headed back up to Outpost Camp to retrieve her pack. At the Portal, I ran into one of the parties we'd been seeing on and off since Day 1. They told me that there was an SAR team looking for a woman with a hurt ankle around Outpost Camp --- and also that a trio of rangers had just headed up the trail. I overtook the rangers and asked them to radio the SAR team to let them know the woman with the hurt ankle had last been seen eating an Egg McMuffin in the Timberline motel. Then I continued toward Outpost Camp, composing abject apologies for the SAR team, whom I was bound to meet coming down. In the midst of this composition, two strapping lads in blaze orange t-shirts, one with a fireman's moustache, strode by me on the way down from what I took to be a record-setting single day ascent of Whitney. A few switchbacks later, I ran into a khaki-clad guy with two dogs. When I asked him if he was Search and Rescue, he said, "No, but they just passed me." DOH!
At Outpost Camp I collected our belongings, strapped Caro's backpack to the outside of mine (which I was using because the collection of things we'd ditched at Outpost Camp was weighty enough that I wanted it in a familiar pack), and headed down, hoping to offer many witticisms to passers-by about how I liked backpacking so much even my backpack had a backpack. But it turned out to be a time of day when that part of the trail was pretty low traffic. I exited, for the second time in 16 hours, in the early afternoon.
Lessons.
(*) Everyone in the party should familiarize themselves with relevant emergency protocols: who to contact, how to contact them, how to call them off. Figuring my job was just to keep moving and be cheerful, I hadn't done this, and it meant two SAR guys spent a day they didn't need to scouring the trail for someone who wasn't there anymore.
(**) If you do anything that might have triggered a search---this includes simply being in manifest distress that good samaritans witness as they descend---, take steps to call the search off if you get out on your own. The evening of 7/22 in Lone Pine, the sheriff who coordinates SAR for Whitney saw C crutching her way across 395, put two and two together, and pulled over to have a (very kind) conversation with us. In the course of this, we learned that they'd received not one but two reports of our plight. I'm pretty sure that this means that at least one party we hadn't asked to call for help on our behalf had called for help on our behalf.
(***) Don't mistake elation for energy. It's probably true that if we'd overnighted at Trail Camp---and there are far worse fates---we'd been fracture-free right now.
Sorry this is so long, and VERY SORRY to SAR for my irresponsibility. Also, very grateful to everyone we encountered during our trip for their support and good spirits.
), and then we saw you again Friday as we were descending and you were on your way up to Outpost Camp to collect your partner's pack. We also spoke with the SAR team earlier that morning near Trailside Meadow, but knew zip about the situation and had no information to give them. 