I've made no secret of the fact that the Whitefire Mountains in the Shattered Sigil books are based on California's Sierra Nevada. The eastern Sierra are the mountains of my heart: rugged, starkly beautiful, challenging for the climber yet blessed with inordinately good weather during the summer months. Today I'll share pictures from one of my favorite trips in the Sierra: an ascent I did of Mt. Whitney via the Mountaineer's Route with my husband-to-be, way back in 1999.
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| Mt. Whitney from the Owens Valley (picture courtesy of owensvalleyhistory.com) |
At 14,505 ft. Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the contiguous US, looming high over the sagebrush desert of the 3,000-ft Owens Valley. The standard route climbs a steep, long, but carefully maintained trail that's so popular the Forest Service allots permits for both dayhikers and backpackers by lottery. (50 backpacking permits per day, 150 dayhiking permits per day.) But for the more adventurous hiker, there's a different, better way to reach the summit: the
Mountaineers Route. This ascends a different, more direct canyon to a basin just beneath Whitney's sheer east face. From there, you scramble up a class 2 couloir to a notch on Whitney's north ridge (see picture below), then either climb class 3 rock straight up to the summit or traverse across alternating snowfields and talus on Whitney's west slope to reach the broad summit plateau.
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| Annoted picture courtesy of whitneyzone.com. The Mountaineers Route travels the canyon visible at the picture's far right, up past the Ebersbacher ledges to Upper Boy Scout Lake. The Notch at the top of the Mountaineer's Route couloir is marked on the right side of the peak. |
For extra fun, Robert and I ascended the route and then spent a night camped right on Whitney's summit, so we could stargaze and enjoy the incredible sights of sunset and sunrise from such a high elevation. (It truly is spectacular. The shadow of the mountain extends for what appears to be a hundred miles; and the rainbow of colors in the sky, from deepest crimson to indigo, is breathtaking. Not to mention the stars after sunset - they really do look close enough to touch, and you've never seen so many.)
Years ago I wrote an
extremely detailed trip report (non-climbers will find it too much so, no doubt!), so I won't repeat that here. The trip was also in my pre-digital-camera days, so my pictures don't do it justice...but here are the few that turned out reasonably well.
