Our group finally successfully make the top in July 1st, I learned a lot from here, so I want to share my experience here. (My English is not very good, sorry for the bad writing.)
We have four people in our group, and we are intermediate hiker, we arrived to lone pine at 12:00 pm, then picked up the permit and go to the trailhead to check out the conditions there. We hike a little bit from old trail to the junction of the main trail and meet three group heading down, none of them make the top, but they give us some good suggestions, like don't bring too much clothes but bring additional watershoe (basically the same suggestions I learned from this forum)
1. We start and meet Jack at 1 am from old trail, the old trail is very easy to follow as long as you find the trailhead from that big rock, I think everyone should take the old trail to avoid the first water crossing, but sadly seems still not too many people know about it.
2. We hiked a little fast at the beginning, one of our member feel leg cramps after 1 hour before we reach Lone Pine Lake, so we slow down a little bit, so my suggestion is to make your backpack as light as possible and slow down but keep going.
3. The log crossing is fixed, so no water crossing necessary there, but there is deep water between Lone Pine Lake and Outpost Camp where you have to cross, so we change to watershoe, then we take off the watershoe and hide it behind a rock when we head to the mirror lake.
4. There is still a lot of snow on the trail after Mirror Lake, we put on crampons there, and reached Trail Camp at 5:30 am, just about sunrise. We each ate some food and pumped water at Trail Camp, we make sure everyone have 3 L water when we start from Trail Camp.
5. We start to use ice axe to hike up the chute at about 6:30 am, the snow is still solid at that time, but it's already a little slushy when we reach the top at 9:20 am, there is a big rock area on the chute, some people take off crampon and walked from that rock to avoid part of the snow, I think it's a good idea if you are not very good at climbed on snow. And I meet one guy make the chute with ice axe and microspiker, but according to him, microspiker is not as useful as crampon at chute.
6. We rest for a bit and leave some gear at Trail Crest to make the backpack a little bit lighter, then head to summit, the last 2.8 miles traverse to summit is exhausting and endless, we don't feel sick but can only hike up very slowly at that altitude. Then we finally make the top at 11:30 am. I see some people leave wag bag on trail and summit, that's horrible.
7. We get back on trail crest at 2:00 pm, and glissade from chute, the "tubeline" from glissade is pretty cool, the snow is quite slushy at that time, we can able to control our speed with feet and ice axe. Actually, other three people in our group don't have much experience on snow, but they still successfully glissade down from the tubeline. Most of people with ice axe choose to glissade down, but Jack is able to hike down because he don't have a ice axe, so hiking down is also doable as long as you take your time and be careful, especially you can use the rock area to help you avoid half of the snow in chute.
8. Then we get back to the car at about 7:30 pm. A very very long day, but worthwhile. The last suggestion I have is that try not break too long each time, we mistakenly break for about 1 hours at least 3 times, just slow down and keep going is better I think.
