We've been discussing this here as many of you seem to have great experience in the area and wondered how many times the members of this board have climbed it.
Speaking from experience, it is a lot easier to plan your second trip after you complete your first trip, so you can become pretty experienced in just a few more trips (with additional insight from the message board). Not everybody here has 50 summits.
As for me, I have summited a total of four times (1994, 1999, 2000, and 2004) via day hikes and have day hiked to Trail Camp a couple of times since then. In 2005, several new members in our group did not like hiking in the summer snowpack, so the rest of us did the right thing and turned around above Trail Camp.
People tend to learn more from mistakes, and there was a lot to be learned when we had group separations on my first three day hikes (with people "who had always wanted to hike Whitney" - a red flag in my book). As I have noted in other posts, my first trip ended with most of our group splitting on the way down while the slow member was having leg cramps going down. The second trip had somebody get airlifted out of Trail Camp after becoming delirious on the upper trail. For my third and fourth trips, I was proactive in providing a lot of straight-talk up front on the hazards of the trail.
