Mt Whitney Zone Forums Trip Reports day hike Whitney Trail Oct 9th need company, have permits

Planned this trip to hike Whitney on Oct. 9th for a while. Today the buddies I was going with all bailed. Instead of being pissed, I'm gonna hike it anyway and enjoy myself.

-I have three extra permits. They're yours for free since I already paid for them.

-I wanna start the trail before 5am. I have a four hour drive home afterwards and dont want to be on the mountain after nightfall

-We can meet at the trailhead on Sunday or at the permit office Saturday afternoon... though I dont' know my exact arrival time on saturday.

-I'm planning on taking 12 hours, round trip. I hike a lot, but never at this high of altitude. I live at sea level so altitude sickness is a worry for me and I don't want to push too high too fast. Plus there's snow on the ground now. I have crampons, but those will make it slow-er going.


let me know if you're interested and we can work something out
thanks!

I might be interested. But I must say that I'm extremely doubtful that I can do this round-trip in 12 hours. I did Mount Langley this summer and it took me just under 14 hours. The trip to Langley has less elevation gain, there was no snow, no ice, and I did not have to lug winter clothes. How's your physical shape?

Maybe I'll just take your permit and fall back if I can't keep up.

I am not interested in hiking Mt. Whitney again this year, but 12 hours round trip in the snow seems way too ambitious to me. The best I could do was 10 hours including an one hour rest at the summit. This was under perfect conditions, wearing running clothes, two bottles of liquid, and running all the downhill sections. The training for that hike included preperation for the Baldy Peaks 50K. This included 10 hikes to Mt. Baldy and San Gorgonio. I don't personally think the affects of altitude kick in until you get over 11,000 feet, but everybody is different.
I think it is great that you are determined to do this hike, but you might plan on more time for this hike, maybe at least 4 more hours not only for the snow and ice, but for the altitude.
GOOD LUCK AND BE CAREFUL

Thanks so much for the advice on hike time. I'm used to reading trail reports and hearing hiking times as 8-9 hours at a "strenuous" pace then finishing them in 6. I'm in shape, but don't consider myself to be incredibly so.

I'll start out on the trail earlier and now place my expectation lower at something like 16 hours. Reading posts it seemed that 7-8 hours to summit would be a moderate to "strenuos" time, which I've always been able to meet in other hikes. I've been hitting up the San Gabriels (Baldy, Wilson) and went to Zion during the summer.

Eugene, would you be interested if we take a slower pace and start earlier in the day? I'm fine waking up as early as possible. I'm not doing the hike for time, but rather just to accomplish it. I'm totally fine going at a slower pace and probably underestimated the difficulty before.

Here is something I have found useful to keep me out of trouble with hikes in particular Mt. Whitney. I set time limits for myself. The main goal of the Mt. Whitney hike is to get back to the trail head safely. However long it takes you to get to the top it is probably going to take you at least 60% of that time to get back. So if you take 10 hours to get to the summit it will take at least 6 hours to get back down. If it takes 12 hours to get up it will take at least 7 hours to get back down. So If it takes you 10 hours to get to Trail Crest, this might not be the day to summit. It just depends how much you want to walk in the dark coming back. The longest part of this day hike is coming back in the dark. By the way take a watch, something wierd would happen to my mobile phone up there where I would have to take the battery out just to see what time it was.

That 60 % idea seems accurate. When I summited, I was 8 hours and 45 minutes up (525 minutes) and 4 hours and 52 minutes down (312 minutes). So my down time was 59.43 % of my up time! (And I thought I'd smoked it going down, oh well . . . )