Every year for the past 12 years, I take a group of friends on an overnight Whitney hike. Since it is such a large group we have not gotten our preferred date in July or August with the Lottery and have had to go in October. The past two years we have been lucky with conditions and both times the scenery was outstanding. This year we had 13 including myself. We definitely owe those that broke trail on Friday and Saturday for making it possible to summit on Monday. I think the experiences of some of the hikers in my group helps to highlight some of the issues facing anyone hiking Whitney this time of year.
Conditioning becomes even more important as you will be challenged more physically and mentally. Hiking on snow, slush, ice and wet rocks takes more effort and focus both of which will create more fatigue than a typical dry trail. I arrange three training hikes each weekend leading up to the week before our Whitney hike. This year we did Baldy (Ski Hut), San Jacinto (Huber Park) and San Gorgonio (Vivian Creek). Everyone in the group who went on all three training hikes made the summit.
In my opinion, acclimating is at least as important as conditioning. I always encourage everyone to come up two days prior to the hike so they can spend one night in Lone Pine and then we do a short day hike to altitude the day before and spend another night either in Lone Pine or the Portal. This year we hiked to Mirror Lake so we could get some first hand exposure to what the conditions would be like. Five in our group could not come up until later and missed the day hike. All five did not make the summit. Two of the five did come up the evening before and hiked to Lone Pine Lake and camped there the night before. They had a miserable night and hiked out the next morning. In my opinion, going from sea level to 10,000 feet in one day and then trying to sleep there is going to be more likely than not to cause altitude related problems. The other three drove up the day before and stayed in Lone Pine.
Hydrate and eat while hiking. Several years ago I started to apply some of the nutritional habits endurance athletes utilize during their events. After all, hiking is an endurance event. Research has shown that your stomach is only capable of absorbing a certain amount of water and calories per hour. If you take in to little it’s obviously a problem but if you take in too much you will cause gastric distress, which wastes some of that energy you need to keep hiking. During my hikes, I have started a ritual of stopping for a couple of minutes every 20 minutes to drink 6-7 oz of water and 80-90 calories. This gets me the max my gut can assimilate and about 6 minutes of rest per hour. Only one person failed to summit that got to Lone Pine two days before and did our warm up hike. He indicated that he did not take the hydration serious enough and knows that he did not drink enough water on our hike into Trail Camp. Anyone interested in endurance nutrition as well as other modern mountaineering techniques take a look at T
he Mountaineering Handbook: Modern Tools and Techniques That Will Take You to the Top, by Craig Connally. Hammer Nutrition’s website also has some excellent material on the subject.
Make sure you stay warm at night. Your body obviously can not recover if you can’t sleep but you also burn way more calories if your struggling to stay warm all night. Those calories can be hard to replace. In these conditions, staying warm means a good bag and a 4-Season tent. I advised everyone in our group to use or rent a 4-season tent. The couple that did not, was cold all night and chose not to leave trail camp for the summit.
Even if you do all the right things, it’s possible you won’t be able to summit but you sure can increase your odds a ton.
Doug, thank you so much for your hospitality at the Hostel and opening it up for a wonderful get together on Saturday. Made for a perfect pre-hike meal and company.
Here are some pictures from Monday. As soon as I get the rest downloaded to Smugmug I will post a link.
