Pacific Crest Trail - Day 72 - Mount Whitney

Woke up to a 2:00am alarm and a dark sky (un)lit by a (nearly?) new moon.

Headlamps from early starting sunrise chasers on the switchbacks above.

Just an easy 7 something miles and 4000+’ to the summit, where 2 are on streams running down the trail, 2 are covered in snow, and 3 are on mixed snow/rock switchbacks.

An attempt at pretending like we’re awake.

Wow.

This triangle seemed somehow symbolic and meaningful. They‘re just rocks, Will. They’re just rocks.

This picture of Guitar Lake is dedicated to Spencer Kilpatrick.

Uhhh… Ummm… There aren’t really words.

Orange and blue. Same old same old.

Psssh. Damn government is always treating us with kid gloves.

We slept in well past a sunrise on the summit attempt and had to settle for unbelievable gradually changing lighting on the way up.

I see an eagle.

Rocks on rocks on rocks. The traverse to the summit is a humbling mile +.

Views from the windows between peaks leading to the summit.

Climbing the boot track to the summit with microspikes. Easy peasy.

The Smithsonian shelter has seen better days.

Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the contiguous United State at 14505 feet above sea level. That’s a very big mountain, that isn’t even half the elevation of many mountains in the Himalaya. The views are spectacular.

Microspikes for the longer traverses across snowed out switchbacks on the descent. Orange shoes are so cool.

Kristin self-belaying with her ice axe across hundreds of feet of consequential traverse above thousands of feet of run out. Don’t tell her mom!

Just a nice little fluffy puff cloud that will be a thunderstorm in a couple hours. Another of a handful of days on this hike where not lingering on a summit has been a fantastic decision.

We were visited by the Lorax on the way down from the summit just as I was questioning the meaning of a physical accomplishment in the context of summiting the tallest peak within an arbitrary border of a failing empire. As clear a sign as I’ve ever received in life.

A beautiful, vacant, National Park ranger station. I’d rant about boomers and how they‘ve consistently squandered the American Dream for the entirety of my lifetime via demographic over-representation but I was just visited by the Lorax and a picture is worth a thousand words.