Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board rock slide on 8/29/04

Did anyone see the rockslide last Sunday? We saw the dust cloud while climbing in the Portal. Does anyone know what happened?

Snow Nymph and I were at Trail Camp talking to a hiker who had recognized her, when we heard the rock slide. Sounded like nothing I'd ever heard out there before. Lasted quite awhile, maybe 30-45 seconds of continuous fall. When we hiked down from Trail Camp about 200 yards, I looked to my right, and saw the huge dust cloud. It appeared to be centered on the slope west of Consultation Lake and Arc Pass. Snowy got some pictures of the dust, but it was starting to get dark, but look for them in her Webshots album, coming soon.

See picture 37 in the following album to see some more major rockfall in the Whitney area.

http://members12.clubphoto.com/robert634908/2045718/guest.phtml

We did not see it, but we sure did hear it. It lasted a long time. We first thought it was a jet.
Later in the day we saw another rockslide south of the John Muir. Nothing like that first one must have been.

We were climbing high above the portal and could see the entire dust cloud. It appeared to be 3-4 thousand feet high and at least 2-3 miles wide. It took at least 30 minutes to disapate completely obscuring the mountains behind it. I've been backpacking and climbing in the Sierras all my life and never seen anything of this scale.

Just goes to show you... nature can and will do what it wants!

<a href="http://community.webshots.com/photo/181412214/182375084EVnJxe"> Dust cloud 15 min after we heard it </a>

Edited to fix link

I fixed the link.

I was thinking the same thing, hope no one was up there.

Snownymph, your photo appears to be tacken around dusk. The rockslide we saw occured around midday. We we half way up Premier Butress when we saw heard the slide and saw the dust. We got back down to the Portal around 3:00PM. There must have been more than one slide or was your picture of dust that was still lingering several hours later?

I was on Arc Pass (Saturday) and McAdie the day before this dust slide (or slides) occurred. Fortunately I had hiked up from Meysan Lake and wasn't in the danger zone. With all that loose stuff sluffing off, who knows what I could have been caught in had I headed up from Consultation Lake (maybe I'd be another statistic). I did happen to hear some minor rockfall when I was at Arc Pass, but nothing on the scale of what occurred Sunday.

Guido, the slide we heard occurred at ~7:30 pm Saturday night. That's what Snow Nymph's picture is from. Then on Sunday morning, while driving from Lone Pine to the Portal Store for pancakes at 10:30 am, I noticed what appeared to be another fresh dust cloud coming from the same area. There wasn't another cloud in the sky, so maybe there were multiple slides that weekend??

How often are there rock slides? We had one, although small on 8/31. We were on the switchbacks coming down so it was about 11:30am. ss stated, nature has its way.
On a climb of Rainer the year before, we had 3 slides once we had climbed over 10K ft with one slide throwing some mellon heads our way. Pitch black so you could not see them, then suddenly you caught movement and there was a rock. In this sence I much prefer Whitney.