Because the vast bulk of my wilderness experience is vicarious, I am wishing more people would post trip reports. So I'm---tardily and on a slender pretext -- adding one of my own.
The approach started on 6/30 from the Duck Pass Trailhead near Mammoth. I will skip over much of it. My first glimpse of Whitney, on 7/7, was from the Bighorn Plateau. It -- Whitney -- was dusted with snow. At least I hope it was dusted. I tried asking a few northbounders for intelligence, but none of them had been to the summit. Most of them produced, usually in the accents of snow-free places, in-principle reasons not to worry about conditions. Despairing of encountering an Inuit with recent first-hand experience of the trail, I eventually stopped asking.
Then I ran into the zen child. He was maybe 11, a few miles short of the PCT-JMT fork, sprawled on his backpack like a cartoon tortoise reclining on its shell. I presumed/hoped he was waiting for his adults. "Are you going up Whitney tomorrow?" he asked.
"I'm not sure." I replied. "I'll try to get to the spur trail and see what the snow looks like."
"I saw that," he said, dreamily. "But I have to go up it, or my adventures will never end."
I hurried on, because nothing he said next could be as awesome as that, and collected my WAG bag at the Crabtree ranger station. By this time it was getting to be late afternoon, and it seemed that I'd have the trail to myself for the rest of my walk to the tarns above Guitar Lake. Then "on your left" someone behind me chimed out. I leapt about three feet in the air as one of the fittest human beings I've ever seen ran by me, dressed as though out for an post-work lap of his suburban neighborhood. "One more," he said. In fact, there were three more, the last one of whom stopped to talk to me. A few words into the conversation, we both realized that a perfectly camouflaged grouse-like creature the size of Norman Rockwell thanksgiving turkey was standing on the trail between us. “It’s just a chicken,” he kept telling me, probably because it was abundantly clear that the accumulating strangenesses were rattling me. He explained that a group of trail ultramarathoners had gone on an "easy" backpacking trip on the HST to Crabtree meadows. This was their afternoon jog.
The tarns above Guitar Lake are my favorite campsite in the Sierras. I set up there and used the last of my fuel to make water hot enough to rehydrate my spaghetti.
Up at sunrise on 7/8, I packed sloppily, and head up. At about 12,500 ft, a snowlike substance begins appearing in ever-larger patches on the trail. It conceals a variety of consistencies and slicknesses under a single outward appearance. The steps more fraught with significance for my future well-being (and there are a few) I test before committing to.
I run out of trail around 8:30. There’s fog between me and the Owens Valley but nothing but clear skies and Sierras to the west. Several gents with cinematographic aspirations ask me to take elaborately-posed shots with them and the summit plaque. One returns the favor. While I am lounging around on the summit jumble hoping the fog will clear, two guys in helmets and carrying tons of hardware haul themselves up on the rocks. They have just climbed ---really climbed, not walked up a trail 30,000 people use a year---the face of Whitney. I fulfill one of my more perverse life-long ambitions by asking them as they gain their feet and start peering around, “Did you know there was a trail up the back?” Fortunately they think this is hilarious and refrain from beating me up.
Although the fog hasn’t lifted, I head down, encountering the ultramarathoners --- impersonating hikers, with trekking poles and everything --- just at the summit spur junction. Claiming (in spite of having arrived on the HST punctuated by bonus afternoon runs) to have never hiked before, THEY ask ME for advice. Through my amazement, I manage to sputter out something about the technique for crossing streams and snow fields and windy ridges in conditions of low ballast --- the technique of only moving one limb at a time. I’m not sure they have it in them to adopt this technique, but they seem grateful.
The snow-like substance abates soon after Trail Crest, and then it’s a long and anti-climactic descent.
In Lone Pine I buy a shower and a clean change of remaindered clothes at the Whitney Hostel Store. Then I take my favorite bus ride in the world ---ESTA along 395 --- to Mammoth, where I hole up for the night.
Also wishing more people would post trail journals, I put up a trail journal that says a lot more about the approach:
torpified's 2015 JMT journal 
