Mt Whitney Zone Forums Trip Reports HST - High Sierra Trail

Steve: there was a trail crew up on Colby for at least a few weeks this summer, doing a lot of blasting and some re-routing. I missed them by a day when I came over. Ranger Laura Pilewski (Rob's wife) was up with them quite a bit. Doubt you'll have any problem with the water, at least I didn't.

Glad to hear you had fun!

-L

Nice adventure. You'll get a kick out of reading the speculations guessing your next move - next time we'll set up a betting pool. Hope your foot heals up quickly. Welcome back!

Really looking forward to this. Sounds like a really great hike, in so many ways.

BTW: I would not disparage your research on Black Kaweah one bit. Secor's west ridge route begins at a notch just to the east of that false summit. He labels it "to Big Arroyo", which I take to mean "any route to here is the right one", which would include yours.

I'll add my congratulations and envy.

Hey Sierra
- I'm going to 18,000 ft Orizaba with Richard P. in Nov. Didn't we have an oxygen canister thread some time back? What do you recommend I take as a trial/ experiment. I was there in 1997 and did okay, but..... the O2GO-XL still the one?

Harvey, you sure get around. November, eh? What's your acclimation regime for 18,000ft Orizaba?

The O2GO-XL fits in a front pocket for easy use. That company also makes a more sophisticated model with a mask and gauge, but a backup canister seems more weight efficient (I count ounces).

Should make for a very interesting trip report.

thanks for advice on O2

aggressive schedule - I am along for the ride . See

orizaba

sorry to be hijacking Steves trip here , I better pipe down

We have very strict rules on threadjacking here.

Should be an awesome trip. That's a lot of up and down.

It just occurred to me, you can't pack the O2 on a plane. You'd have to ship it by truck to Oso or something.

Regarding that silly digression about the dark green shading on the GMAP around the Whitney crest, my GIS expert was not familiar and too busy to look into it. He agreed it seemed to be rather crudely drawn by mapping standards and probably quite arbitrarily delineated at small map scaled. If he ever finds the original vector or meta data, I'll bump back or start a new thread.

Regarding the same darker green on the Google maps:

I asked the Gmap4 creator, and he wrote back:

I'm clueless.
First time I have seen it.

From the looks of the Google Maps and other situations in the Sierra, including the placement of the North Fork Whitney "trail", and the Main Trail, and the naming of the "Frog Pond", it appears there are some bozos in the map department who just have no clue what they are doing.

STeve, I'm not so sure.

1. We expect technology to be perfect, and are surprised when it is not. I've seen people argue over where a trail was, based upon GPS, where the difference was a few feet. No understanding of accuracy.

2. There are certain things that crop up in technical fields unexpectedly. Sometimes referred to as the "ghost in the machine". Extremely hard to track down or explain.
Remember that these maps were generated from aerial photographs. One artifact that may have existed were shadows. For example, a shadow line may exist at 8-9am that might approximate this, and the software might not interpret it correctly, or even know what to do with it. Also, the software allows one to adjust the "shading", and it might interpret things funny.

3. mapmakers usually deliberately place "errors" on their maps, as a watermark to protect their copyright. These are things that will not effect use.

I believe we are talking about #2, here. We all know that there is nothing on the ground where that line is. Such shading usually refers on topos to vegetation, and there clearly is none.

I recall one map system that allowed you to run/stop the motion of the sun, with the shadows running across the terrain from dawn to dusk.

Also, the pictures used are spliced together by the software, and there may be artifacts of the pictures. For example, using the G4 maps, when I switch to "satellite view", and move a little out, there is an artifactual vertical line created between photos at the west base of Whitney.

I imagine this drives mapmakers crazy.

SOOOOoooooooooo, how was that hike?

I can't help but point out the irony here: Steve's awesome hike is turning into a digression on this thread about Steve's awesome hike. It probably would not have gone that way if he was orchestrating things like he normally does - which we all take for granted to some extent. If this were someone else's trip report, Steve would've created a new thread for this green-shading map discussion, the trail crews, Mexican mountain climbing, etc. and brought it back in focus to the hiker's adventure, which was Steve's adventure. If you think about it, his brief absence on this one particular thread is a testimonial to his effectiveness as a forum moderator.

This is a perfect opportunity to reflect for a minute on how Steve overlaps outstanding technical skill sets with personal respectfulness and unusual common sense over a sustained period of dedication. This is extremely rare and should be recognized, and I'm not just sucking up here, I really mean it. It's what keeps so many interesting people coming back to the Zone.

And again, how was that hike, Steve? In the infamous words of Wagga, if ya ain't got pictures, then it never happened...

Minor edits not worth documenting...

So, uh, feel free to "edit" yourselves if the thread is not to to someone's standard/liking, because we just went through a whole flap about censoring, editing, etc. Don't wanna get too anal about these things.

Sorry Bee, I have no idea what you are referring too. What flap? I edit a significant percentage of my posts. I guess I missed a flap of some sort. Please explain or send me a PM.

Actually, the discussion about the green shading is ok -- I re-opened it by posting that I'd asked Joseph from Gmap4.

As for that trip report... I'm STILL trying to get the entire set of pictures uploaded, with less than great success. Seems I have crappy Internet service lately. Must be too many people downloading movies and such on my street.

I am curious, too, what the shading is supposed to represent. Being a computer geek myself, I am sure it is not due to some unknown glitch. You can follow the shading all over the Sierra, and it certainly doesn't make any logical sense. But it IS there, caused by someone's setting up some sort of shading routine to show up with corners and lines at specific locations. This sort of random garbage occurs all the time. I just spent over a day doing work someone else paid a good salary was unable to do. Incompetence rears its ugly head every so often.

This thread can go on and on... I will start a new one with a real trip report in due time.

Alright, need to go try to upload a few more....

Sorry Bee, I have no idea what you are referring too. What flap? I edit a significant percentage of my posts. I guess I missed a flap of some sort. Please explain or send me a PM.


I don't have time for lengthy PMs or explainations beyond the obvious reference towards the general resistance to editing/censoring/outside invovement with the natural progression of a thread. Understandable attitude. This has been stated clearly in other threads, unless, of course, you are being facetious in not knowing what I am referring to.

Anyhow, as I stated, feel free to start new threads if the topic matter is not adhering to a particular thread standard of singularity.

The digression was simply for some of the regulars here to do something while we were waiting for Steve. Better than some forums where posters keep a thread alive and near the top by using ttt (to the top, although that might be appropriate pun)

Harvey, it was 5 nights, but 6 full hiking days.

I didn't bring much back. Ate all my granola / pwd milk / tang breakfasts. Ate all the 3.5 oz tuna sandwich mix in foil pouches and sardines in oil. By the way, sardines in oil, about the third day, really got the taste buds excited. half a bagel was barely enough to sop up all that oil. Out like that, I was after ALL the calories I could get. This trip, I learned that bagels go well on the trail!

Dinners: Mountain House meals, repackaged to 4 oz units, were just a bit much. 3 to 3.5 would have been better.

Snacks: 2 granola bars (Fibre One is my favorite) a day, 2 Mounds single (small) bars a day, and a large handful of trail mix: almonds, pecans, TJ's fancy raisins. (I actually threw out 2 protein bars I thought might be ok for variety. Ugh! They're disgusting!)

Less than a pound came back. And I was still ravenous for a few days afterwards. Had a steak dinner in Lone Pine, followed by a pint of ice cream that night.

I'm still not clear on what you're referring to, Bee. Sorry. I'm not being facetious, just not getting what you mean about resistance to editing/censoring/outside involvement. Oh, well.