Firstly, I'd like to thank all of the users of this forum, it was our first time on the Mt. Whitney trail and the information here was invaluable to making our trip a safe and good one. Until we read some of the warnings here we didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into, having bagged a permit for the first weekend of May.
The trail was stunning and we met many friendly hikers along the way that happily gave us advice about what was ahead of us. We set our goal to make it to the bottom of the chute and evaluate the situation from there. We were told it might be soft enough to carefully make our way up, and just to make sure we were down before it was in the shade (I think thats around 2pm).
We encountered the first patchy snow below Alpine lake which was was mostly iced over:
Bighorn park:
The snow was mostly avoidable or well packed until above mirror lake:
Some previous reports said there was no water above mirror lake, while consultation lake is still completely iced over, there are now numerous little streams and ponds of snow melt all the way up to trail camp. Note that there is one switchback not far from trail camp that is completely snowed over, people were making their way across with ice axes, but it is avoidable if you take the snow field to the climbers left, via consultation lake (wish I took a photo of this.. sorry).
There is plenty of non-snow covered space for about a half dozen tents at trail camp:
As others have noted, the 99 switchbacks are still full of snow/ice and the snow at the bottom of the chute stayed pretty hard until about 9am. We called it quits there:
We watched a bunch of well equipped hikers make their way up the chute:
When we returned to trail camp the marmots were out in full force, somebody left out a ration pack:
We tried to scare him off, but he was right back at it as soon as we turned out backs..
We made it back down to the cars by about 4pm, stopping to soak in some of the amazing views:
We will definitely be back to attempt the summit some day
