Thought I would post after this site helped me to prepare and have a safe trip
Hiked from Whitney Portal to Trail Camp day one Summit and then back to Whitney Portal day 2
- We started at the old whitney trail ~ 7am and this allowed us to skip the north fork fork of lone pine creek crossing. - Snow at lone pine lake and no sign of trail from this point on up to trail camp. - Time for Crampons. - We kinda followed the main trail via GPS initially ascending from lone pine lake directly west and towards outpost but then boot tracks took us up and south of the main trail, south of outpost and south of mirror lake. - We followed this well worn trail of boot tracks south of outpost camp, south of mirror lake and south (above) of the main drainage. - This ended up connecting back with the with the main trail before/east of Consolation Lake. - Made it to Trail Camp ~ 3:00pm. - We had a nice night at Trail Camp, plenty of spots to camp off the snow, no wind and we were plenty warm in a +5 bag. - 7am start for the summit... late compared to many other people! - Climbing/walking up the chute following boot tracks made it an "easy" walk up a very long flight of stairs. I can imagine this being a huge challenge later in the day when snow is soft and slushy. - ~10:30 at Trail Crest. From here to the summit crampons are not needed. - The trail gets a little lost in the snow right before the final ascent and we just rock scrambled towards the top and as you ascend you can pick up the trail again. - ***~ 12:00 SUMMIT*** - Heading down there is a little (~200ft) glissade to the right of the summit that was fun. - Glissade down the big chute next to the 99 switchbacks was awesome and steep at the very beginning - Heading towards the parking lot after packing up at trail camp (~5:00) once we passed Consolation Lake there is a fork in the boot track trail. - The left fork heads towards Mirror Lake and Outpost Camp and the right followed our ascent south of the main drainage, south of Mirror and south of Outpost. - If you stay as south as possible you will end up above Lone Pine Lake and can have a final fun glissade (~500ft) down to the lake. - We were at the truck by 7:30. The snow made for a very fast descent!
