For some reason I had not yet tagged Mt. Muir nor I had ever been over the Whitney-Russell col so rather than trekking up the trail, I planned an overly ambitious day. The idea was to go over the Whitney-Russell col, tag Hale and Young and then make my way up to Muir and down the trail. I really enjoyed the valley between Russell and the North Side of Whitney. Looking forward to attempting a Russell-Whitney double at some point in the future using the North Face. It was much slower going than I expected getting to Hale/Young and I didn't realize that I was dropping so much and would be in for a 10,000' elevation day if I tagged both, so I ended up skipping Hale/Young and headed down to Guitar Lake. Enjoyed hiking on the JMT up to Muir. Hadn't been back there before. When I got to Muir, I figured the cairns and route would be obvious. I picked the most obvious line and then encountered what I thought was a 4th class move so went down a bit and scouted out other options. I started to grow a bit frustrated but a group of two came up and had the right beta. I re-climbed the obvious line and then discovered a somewhat non-intuitive 3rd class move to circumvent the 4th class one. Tagged the summit (it was very windy!) and flew down the trail. It was about a 12 hour day with 8000' of gain and around 19 miles. Fun.
Wow, impressive trip! And you had time to take pictures!
The switchbacks from Muir are always impressive.
Congratulations.
I'd be wary of that north-side Whitney ascent. The few reports I've seen have been with some consolidated snow, so traction on the steepest slopes is better using crampons.
I’m very interested in ascending the North Face. It seems like late August is probably a good time to climb without crampons, but would be bad to be up there without them if you needed them.
I’m very interested in ascending the North Face.
There are many ways to climb the North Face, but the route I found was crap. There was rotten class-4 rock, and some snow and ice that weren’t much better. Yes, there was some good climbing, but I’m in no hurry to do it again.