The 99 Switchbacks Are Not 99 Switchbacks

There is a number attached to Mount Whitney that everyone who has hiked it repeats, and almost nobody has verified. The switchbacks above Trail Camp — the wall of stacked traverses that carries the trail from 12,039 feet up to Trail Crest — are universally called the 99 switchbacks.

People have counted them. The number that comes back is 97.

It is a small thing, and it is the most honest possible introduction to this mountain, because almost everything about Whitney is slightly different from its reputation. It is the highest summit in the lower 48, and it is a walk-up. It has no exposure to speak of, and it hurts more people than mountains that do. It is 10.7 miles from the car to the roof of the contiguous United States, which sounds like a long day hike, and is.

• Trailhead: Whitney Portal, 8,360 ft, thirteen miles west of Lone Pine, California
• Summit: Mount Whitney, 14,505 ft — the highest point in the contiguous United States
• Distance: about 21.4 miles round trip on the Mount Whitney Trail
• Elevation change: 6,145 ft
• The switchbacks: between Trail Camp (12,039 ft) and Trail Crest, roughly 1,600 vertical feet
• Managing agency: Inyo National Forest — permit required, quota season, lottery through Recreation.gov
• Typical strategy: a single very long day, or one night at Outpost Camp or Trail Camp

Eleven miles of getting higher

The trail starts at Whitney Portal, 8,360 feet, at the end of a road that climbs out of the Owens Valley from Lone Pine. That road does a lot of the work: the valley floor is around 3,700 feet, and the drive gains most of a mile before you shoulder a pack.

From there the Mount Whitney Trail climbs steadily and never really stops. It passes Lone Pine Lake at roughly 2.8 miles, crosses into the Outpost Camp basin, and then goes through the last of the trees. Above Outpost the pines thin, then quit. Nothing about the next seven miles is shaded.

Trail Camp sits at 12,039 feet beside a small tarn, and it is where the hike splits into two philosophies. One group sleeps here, which trades a night at altitude for a shorter summit day. The other group walked past this spot before dawn and will walk past it again after dark.

The wall

Above Trail Camp the basin ends in a headwall, and the trail does the only thing it can: it goes back and forth. Roughly 1,600 vertical feet of switchbacks, cut into granite, stacked close enough that from below the whole thing reads as a single zigzag scar.

Partway up there is a section where cables are bolted to the rock. They are there because that stretch holds snow and ice long after the rest of the trail is dry — it faces the wrong way and sits in shade for much of the day. In an average year it is a nuisance. In a heavy snow year it is the crux of the entire hike, and it is the reason people carry an ice axe on a trail that is otherwise a walk.

The switchbacks top out at Trail Crest, a notch in the Sierra crest a little over 13,600 feet. Standing in it, the mountain finally shows you the other side: the Owens Valley and the White Mountains behind, and ahead, west, the Kern River country and the back of the Sierra falling away in a way that does not photograph.

Why the easy mountain is the dangerous one

At Trail Crest the barometric pressure is around 60 percent of sea level. That is the number underneath every Whitney story that ends badly — roughly 40 percent less oxygen in every breath than the coast most Whitney hikers drove up from that morning.

Acute mountain sickness does not care how fit you are. It is a function of how high you went and how fast, and the Whitney day hike is close to a worst case: sea level to 14,505 feet inside about 24 hours, with the hardest climbing done in the thinnest air. Headache, nausea, and the specific stupidity that comes with hypoxia arrive somewhere on the switchbacks for a large fraction of the people on them.

The other clock is weather. The Sierra builds afternoon thunderstorms in summer, and Trail Crest and the summit ridge are the last places anyone wants to be standing when one arrives. That is most of the reason for the alpine starts — not machismo, arithmetic.

The last two miles

From Trail Crest the trail meets the John Muir Trail coming up from the west, and turns north along the crest for the final push. This is the best part of the hike and the part nobody describes, because by then most people are not in a describing mood.

The trail traverses the back of a row of granite spires — Keeler Needle, Crooks Peak, Mount Muir — and between them are gaps in the ridge that people call the windows. Through each one, briefly, you can see straight down the east face to the Owens Valley, roughly 10,000 feet below. Then the rock closes again and you are back on the west side, walking on broken granite.

The summit itself is a plateau, not a point — a wide tilted field of shattered rock with a stone hut on it. The Smithsonian Institution built that shelter in 1909 for astronomers. It is not a refuge from lightning and the Forest Service is explicit that nobody should treat it as one.

What Inyo National Forest requires

Whitney is quota-controlled. Both day hikers and overnight parties need a permit during the main season, and demand so far exceeds supply that the Forest Service allocates them by lottery through Recreation.gov, with any leftovers released afterward.

Two other requirements catch people out. Human waste has to be packed out — the Forest Service issues WAG bags with the permit, and there is no alternative on a mountain this heavily used. And the permit is for a specific entry date and party size; it is not a general pass to the Whitney Zone.

Everything specific here — the current quota, the lottery window, what is required in your pack, and what is actually on the switchbacks this week — belongs to the agency, not to us. Start at the Inyo National Forest Mount Whitney page linked above.

The name, and the older name

The mountain was named in 1864 for Josiah Whitney, the State Geologist of California, by members of his own survey. Whitney himself never stood on it.

The first recorded ascent came in 1873, by three fishermen from Lone Pine — Charles Begole, A. H. Johnson, and John Lucas — who went up on a day off and, for a while, got the summit called Fishermen's Peak. The name did not stick, though there is a case that it should have.

Long before either, the Paiute people of the Owens Valley had their own name for it. It appears in the record as Tumanguya. The mountain had been the highest thing in sight for as long as anyone had been looking at it.

Where this series goes next

Iconic Day Hikes covers the routes people plan a year around: Angels Landing, Half Dome, Grinnell Glacier, Franconia Ridge, Katahdin's Knife Edge, and now Whitney. What links them is not difficulty — it is that each one has a single feature everybody who has done it talks about afterward. Whitney's is a wall of switchbacks that is not quite 99 switchbacks.

You can fly the whole route in 3D on the trail page: Whitney Portal to the summit, with the switchbacks rendered turn by turn.

Sources

• Mount Whitney is 14,505 ft, the highest summit in the contiguous United States; Whitney Portal trailhead is 8,360 ft; the Mount Whitney Trail is about 21.4 miles round trip with 6,145 ft of elevation change — Mount Whitney Trail
• Trail Camp sits at 12,039 ft at the base of the switchbacks; the switchbacks are commonly called the 99 switchbacks but the counted number is 97 — Mount Whitney trail guide
• Mount Whitney permits, quota season, the Recreation.gov lottery, WAG bag requirement, and current conditions — Inyo National Forest, Mount Whitney
• Mount Whitney Zone permit lottery and reservations — Recreation.gov
• The mountain was named in 1864 for Josiah Whitney, State Geologist of California; first recorded ascent 18 August 1873 by Charles Begole, A. H. Johnson and John Lucas, briefly known as Fishermen's Peak; the Paiute name is recorded as Tumanguya — Mount Whitney
• The stone summit shelter was built by the Smithsonian Institution in 1909 for astronomical observation — Smithsonian Institution Shelter
• Acute mountain sickness risk rises with rate of ascent and altitude reached, independent of fitness — CDC Yellow Book, High Elevation Travel and Altitude Illness
• Barometric pressure at 13,600 ft is roughly 60 percent of sea-level pressure, i.e. about 40 percent less oxygen per breath — standard atmosphere
• Route geometry: Whitney Portal to the summit stitched from OpenStreetMap ways named Mount Whitney Trail and John Muir Trail, 17.01 km one-way, with the switchback section measured at 8,825 degrees per km of turn density — OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0

Keep reading

• Katahdin's Knife Edge: a mile of trail the width of a sidewalk
• Half Dome: the permits, the cables, and how the hike works
• Angels Landing: the permit, the chains, and the fin

Hero photograph: The switchbacks above Trail Camp, the section every Whitney hiker talks about afterward — 1,600 feet of engineered trail stacked into a single granite wall between 12,000 feet and Trail Crest. by Cullen328, licensed under CC BY 3.0.