Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Lone Pine Lake without pass

I've read that you can go to Lone Pine Lake on the main trail without a pass. But after Lone Pine Lake they start checking your pass. We have a pass to hike on 9/21 - 9/23 and were thinking that camping at LPL would better acclimate ourselves then at the portal campgrounds.

Would they be checking passes if we were to stay one night without a pass at LPL?

My recollections is that camping is not allowed at Lone Pine Lake

***However you can not camp at Lone Pine Lake without a backpacking permit on the Main Mt. Whitney Trail. That means you have no chance of camping there now (unless you got a permit for the main Mt. Whitney trail, given out in the Spring in the lottery).***

Not all overnight permits for all dates throughout the entire lottery quota season (May 1 - Nov 1) were given out via the spring lottery. If your schedule has the flexibility to do an overnight on date(s) for which there are either (1) overnight permits left over from the spring lottery and/or (2) available overnight permits due to cancellations (and I understand cancellations have been at or near an all time high this year), then you can still do an overnight on the Main Trail, even if you didn't get an overnight permit during the spring lottery.

Upon checking the Inyo's web site for current camping restrictions on the Main Trail, I found only Mirror Lake and Trailside Meadow to be restricted.

If you want to see how many leftover overnight permits are still available (and on what dates), see the following web page:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/inyo/recreation/wild/permits_res/whitney_avail.html

Admittedly, at the moment, there are precious few overnight permits left over until around Oct 12. Day-to-day cancellations may be another matter. Understandably, there is no similar calendar displaying those.

CaT