Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Lost Backpack on backside of Whitney, MR

Way too go younger brother.....way to help out little sis. Did you go up the mnteer or up the trail and around? Was the note still on it..For the Sheriffs Dept.? Marmots get to an of it?

Eric Owen you da man.

Marmots left it alone (I think the wag bag scared 'em off) and the note you left on it about the Sheriffs was still there. One of your compatriots who shall remain unnamed, went through the pack and selected choice items to take home with him, but I actually encountered him in the Iceberg Moraine just below and when I told him what I was doing he (quite honestly) said, "Oh, man! You're lucky...I was totally taking those crampons home with me!" Then he dumped his bag and pulled out my sisters crampons, crampon bag, emergency bivvy, headlamp and North Face hat. Which I then had to carry back UP to Iceberg Lake... LOL

Still, gotta hand it to him...I never would have known all that stuff was in his bag, so he WAS honest.

As it was, I drove up from L.A. that morning, got on the trail at 9am and reached the notch at 3pm. The pack was there, in good shape, and I brought it back down. Suffered a bit from HAPE but that went away when we left the portal (just ascended to quickly without becoming acclimated). Feet are sore and a bit blistered, and carrying her pack combined with my day pack and mountaineering gear was a bit TOO heavy (even for me) as well as awkward, but I made it work out.

Thanks so much for your help. If you hadn't taken the time to rope down and grab the bag I never would have been able to recapture it. As it is, my sister will be able to go on to Kilimanjaro without having to buy a whole new set of gear.

Mercy! That is something of a new low for wilderness conduct. No wonder the sheriffs department is skeptical of people recovering packs.

That the police would consider pressing charges is sad. I'd never make a good cop.

If you helped re-unite a lost child in a shopping mall with its mom, would you be suspected of attempted kidnapping?

If you were riding on a bus/sitting in an airport, and noticed a suitcase with loud ticking and in turn notified police who discovered it was a bomb, would you be suspected of being the bomber?

I don't wish to hijack this thread (at least it had a happy ending) but am saddened that the lesson from the law enforcement types when finding lost items is to simply leave them. To me, that's a world turned upside down.

Hi GigaMike and Richard P,

Thanks for your observations from the Arctic Lake drainage exploration yesterday (Sun 7/6).

Yesterday at dinnertime I thought I recognized Richard P in the Portal parking lot not far from the walkin campsites (as well as on the Whitney summit 6/22, etc,etc). I was too shy to take a chance and introduce myself, but have appreciated Richard's multitude of trip reports and photos over recent years.

Anyway, on Sat (7/5) and Sun (7/6) my buddy and I were in the Whitney area on a trip we had planned back in January. We had recently followed this thread (up to Thurs 7/3) with some interest. On Sat from about 1300 to 1500 we travelled from the base of the south face of Russell to the outlet of Actic Lake. We moved over all the unpleasant large rocks and the little remaining snow on the south side of the three small lakes (not two as in the original post) and reached the outlet of Arctic Lake again along the south shore.

We studied various possible fall lines for the pack from both the Notch and from the Traverse. Snow below the west end of the Traverse had several skid marks, but I doubted a pack could be the cause.

Importantly to us was the lack of significant snow on the North Face of Whitney. We felt it very unlikely the pack could make it to the lakes as originally posted.(Original post: It fell down the long scree slope above Arctic Lake, just to the right of the two smaller lakes. Pretty much the whole way down.") Did you guys think the same? I was starting to suspect the original post was from Crystal! (History has revealed that when the North Face is snow covered, the human body has no problem reaching the lakes.)

Getting home we read the recent updates on this thread and that Eric Owen had discovered the pack 500' down the hill, not a the bottom. Our suspicions about the pack location were correct, but fortunately we were wrong about the possible reappearance of Crystal.

For those who do not know Eric Owen, he is not a big fellow. But I do hope the original poster of this thread gives him a big award for the considersble effort and risk he took hauling a big pack up 500' on that loose and steep terrain.

By the way, the outlet of Arctic Lake is teeming with good sized trout. It is much easier and pleasant to get to the outlet from Guitar Lake than from the Russell direction.

Cheers, Jim

Well, it would only be the second time this particular thread was hijacked, and since the item has been recovered, why not take the opportunity to comment on what may or may not have occurred and wether any of us including experts can gain from this experience?

Assuming Forest Service issued one permit with assumed wag bag, was forest service notified when pack was "lost" [s]leftdiscovered to be inadvertantly[/s] dropped(?)
found to be out of reach?

What if this was some kind of set-up? We haven't heard from the "sister" yet have we? We don't really know if Los Angeles Sooner is even from Los Angeles.

BUT, I can see where, if law enforcement, had knowledge of a missing person, crime, etc., or perhaps being professionaly trained in... well, law enforcement; they might want to have a "found" pack left where it is, in order to access assess excess preserve a "possible" crime scene. Or, maybe this could have turned out similar to that "bomb scene" scenario. It seems the officer might arrest someone interfering with that suitcase, even though they didn't suspect them of the plant!

As I wander, I'll wonder what the Forest Service and/or Sheriffs department viewpoint/protocol is (specific to Whitney of course and this thread). Wonder, wander, wonder...

By the way, one thing didn't make it: the Gerber flip open pocket knife (retail value $40 at REI).

I guess someone decided that would make a nice Mt. Whitney souvenir. *sigh*

That sucks...but, again...better the gear than my sis.

Jesus! Nit pickers, conspiracy theorists and would-be moralists. I guess every Internet message board has their fair share.

I'll just ignore the above and say thanks again to Eric for taking the risk to pull my sister's pack back up to the Notch.

Well done!

My two cents... for what it's worth...

You know... in defense of the law enforcement officials.. it could be that there's more to the story that no one really knows and maybe something really -had- happened to make that particular area a crime scene. Maybe they just weren't privy to sharing the information with Eric...

It isn't always the law enforcement just being buttheads ya know...

Glad to hear the backpack was located and brought down. We looked all around the notch area (14100 feet) yesterday and saw nothing. When we picked up our permits Monday morning the lady at the forest service said the backpack had been brought down.

Someone has to stick up for the LEO occassionally...