The Other Way Up Mount Whitney

Mount Whitney has a front door. It is at Whitney Portal, thirteen miles up a road out of Lone Pine, and it is where nearly everyone who climbs the mountain starts — twenty-two miles round trip, six thousand feet of gain, the ninety-nine switchbacks, usually squeezed into one enormous day.

The John Muir Trail arrives from the opposite direction, and it does not treat the summit as a destination you drive to and come back from. It treats it as the end of the trail. Two hundred and eleven miles from Happy Isles in Yosemite Valley, the JMT's southern terminus is the top of Mount Whitney. Hikers who get there have been walking for two or three weeks.

The two routes share exactly one thing: the last 1.9 miles.

• Section: Crabtree Meadow to the summit of Mount Whitney — the final leg of the John Muir Trail
• Distance: about 7.4 miles one way
• Guitar Lake: 11,500 ft — the last reliable water and the last practical camp
• Guitar Lake to the summit: 4.8 miles, roughly 3,000 ft of climbing
• Trail junction: 13,480 ft, where the route from Whitney Portal joins
• Summit: 14,505 ft — the highest point in the contiguous United States and the JMT's southern terminus
• Managing agency: Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks; Inyo National Forest east of the crest

The last camp with trees

Coming south, the trail drops into Crabtree Meadow at around 10,600 feet. This is the last place on the JMT that looks like the Sierra people picture — foxtail pines, a creek, flat ground, a seasonal ranger station nearby. Everything above it is rock.

From Crabtree the trail climbs past Timberline Lake, which is exactly what the name says: the trees give out here and do not come back. Camping at Timberline Lake is not allowed. It is a small, heavily-loved alpine basin and the parks closed it to overnight use; hikers who arrive late and are looking for a spot need to keep walking.

Guitar Lake

Another mile and a half up, the basin opens and there it is: a lake at 11,500 feet with a rounded body and a narrow neck of water running off one end. From the shore it reads as an oddly-shaped tarn. It is only when you have climbed a thousand feet above it the next morning, and you turn around, that the name stops being a curiosity and becomes obvious.

Guitar Lake is the last reliable water before the summit, and for most JMT hikers it is the last camp. There are smaller tarns above it that hold water in a good year and are dry in a bad one; nobody sensible counts on them. Whatever you are carrying up the west face, you are filling it here.

It is also, at 11,500 feet, a genuinely hard place to sleep. The wind comes down off the crest, the temperature drops fast once the sun goes behind the wall, and you are trying to rest at an altitude where a lot of people simply cannot. Most parties are moving again by two in the morning — partly to be on the summit for sunrise, partly because the Sierra builds afternoon thunderstorms and the crest is the last place to be standing in one.

The west face

Above the lake the trail does the only thing it can with a two-thousand-foot granite wall: it switchbacks. Not the famous ninety-nine — those are on the other side, above Trail Camp — but a set of its own, stacked tight enough that in the dark you see the whole climb above you as a chain of headlamps working back and forth across the face.

It is 4.8 miles and about 3,000 feet from Guitar Lake to the summit, and the west face is where most of that happens. The benches are well graded and there is no scrambling, which is exactly what makes the altitude the whole story. At 13,000 feet there is roughly forty percent less oxygen in each breath than at the coast most people drove from a few weeks earlier. Fitness helps less than you would like. Time spent high helps more, which is the one real advantage a JMT hiker has over a day-hiker from sea level: two weeks of sleeping above 10,000 feet.

Where the two Whitneys meet

At 13,480 feet the trail tops out on the crest and runs into a signed junction, and the mountain changes character completely. This is where the route up from Whitney Portal arrives. Until this moment a JMT hiker may have seen a dozen people all morning. From here to the summit there is a line.

Most southbound hikers drop their packs at the junction — there is usually a small pile of them behind rocks — and go up with water and a jacket. The last 1.9 miles traverse the back of the crest behind a row of granite spires: Keeler Needle, Crooks Peak, Mount Muir at 14,018 feet. Between them the ridge is notched, and through each notch, for a few steps, you can see straight down the east face to the Owens Valley something like 10,000 feet below. Hikers call them the windows. They are the most dramatic thing on the route and they last about three seconds each.

The end of the trail

The summit of Mount Whitney is not a point. It is a wide, tilted plateau of shattered granite, big enough to lose people on, with a stone hut sitting on it.

The Smithsonian Institution built that shelter in 1909, to house scientists studying the atmosphere from the highest ground they could reach in the country. It is the highest permanent building in the contiguous United States. It is not a lightning refuge, and the agencies are explicit that nobody should treat it as one — the shelter was struck and a visitor killed in 1990. If a storm is building, the answer is to be somewhere else, lower.

For a day-hiker the summit is the halfway point and there are eleven miles still to walk. For a JMT hiker it is the finish line, and there is something strange about the fact that the trail simply stops here, at a survey marker on a pile of rock, with no ceremony and usually with a crowd. Then they walk down the front door — over the junction, down the ninety-nine switchbacks, out to Whitney Portal — and finish a two-hundred-mile trail in a parking lot that smells like the burger stand.

What this side requires

The west-side approach is inside Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and the descent to Whitney Portal crosses into the Inyo National Forest's Whitney Zone, so a JMT hike finishing this way touches more than one permitting authority. A continuous thru-hike is normally covered by the permit it started on, with the Whitney Portal exit declared up front — which is why the exit gets chosen at application time and not on the mountain.

Two requirements catch people regardless of where they started. A bear canister is required for this stretch, with no thru-hiker exemption. And human waste has to be packed out between Guitar Lake and Whitney Portal — you carry a kit, you use it, and you deposit it at the trailhead.

Quotas, lottery windows, exit rules, and what is actually on the west face this week all belong to the agencies, and all of them change year to year. Start with Sequoia and Kings Canyon for the trail itself and Inyo National Forest for the Whitney Zone.

Which side to climb

If the goal is the summit and you have a weekend, the east side is the answer and it is not close — one trailhead, one trail, one very long day.

If the goal is the mountain, the west side is a different experience entirely. Whitney from Whitney Portal is a climb. Whitney from Guitar Lake is an arrival: you have been walking toward it through the High Sierra for two weeks, you camp underneath it, and you go up in the dark with the whole range behind you. Same summit, and almost nothing else in common.

Sources

• Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks — wilderness permits and regulations
• Inyo National Forest — Mount Whitney permits, quotas and conditions
• Pacific Crest Trail Association — John Muir Trail regulations
• Smithsonian Institution Shelter, Mount Whitney (built 1909)

Keep reading

• The 99 Switchbacks Are Not 99 Switchbacks — Whitney from the east side
• The Hardest Mile of the John Muir Trail Is the Permit

Hero photograph: Guitar Lake and Mount Young, seen from high on Mount Whitney's west face — the view back down that gives the lake its name. by Thomas Kriese, licensed under CC BY 2.0.