As the winter continues, myself and my co-blogger, Jaime, have started to map out our plan for hiking Mt. Whitney this year. If you’ve been following the blog, then you know that this was the reason we started blogging in the first place. It has been our intention to catalog this adventure and along the way provide some insight to the planning and products that we are and will be using.
Much of our planning was done using “Mount Whitney: The Complete Trailhead-to-Summit Guide” by Paul Richins, Jr. This book has been invaluable as we prepare for the hike. If you are considering hiking Mt. Whitney then I would highly recommend that you take a look at this book. It covers it great detail most of the items that I will be discussing today and many of the topics that we will be covering moving forward.
Before we settled anything else, we needed to decide which route we were going to take, as this would influence immediate decisions like the amount of time the hike would take and the best time to go. But the route choice also influences a whole host of decisions from how much training you will need to do based on the ruggedness of the route to the logistics of how you will be getting to the trail head. All of which we will attempt to share with you in upcoming posts.
Both of us are comfortable in the outdoors. And while I won’t go into a huge amount of history we have both done a substantial amount of hiking and camping. But we have also not done much hiking and camping in the High Sierras. These factors really drove out decision to hike the High Sierra Trail from the west side of the mountains to Mt. Whitney. This is probably the most popular trail that takes you from the west side of the Sierras to Mt. Whitney. We will start in Crescent Meadow in Sequoia National Park and finish at the Whitney Portal. The trail is 73.5 miles long and will encompass 15,531 feet of elevation gain. This route should take 6 to 8 days to finish. We will go into more detail about the route in a later post.
Once the route decision was settled we had to decide when we wanted to do the hike. The hiking season in the High Sierras is usually between mid-June and mid-October. Based on this, and working around two very busy schedules we have picked two date ranges, a primary and secondary, to aim for. Our first planned dates will be from August 2 to August 11 and our secondary will be from September 20 to September 29. Both dates will allow for plenty of time for completion of the hike. I believe that is an important aspect when planning something like this. You really do not want to be rush. While the goal is to stand at the top of Mt. Whitney, the true excitement will truly be in the journey to get that and we want to be able to enjoy the journey.
Since we have our route and our date decided the next big item to tackle is not so much planning but preparation. If you were to hike Mt. Whitney from the east side of the Sierras there are a myriad of permits and passes that might be necessary for you to obtain. If however, you are taking the western route then your permit situation clears up considerably. This quote is taken directly from the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks website:
Hiking the High Sierra Trail and Mineral King area to the summit of Mt. Whitney AND exiting Whitney Portal, the ONLY permit you need is from Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
The National Park Service begins issuing these permits on March 1 and we will be submitting our application on that day.
Now that a lot of the big picture planning is complete, expect to see more posts really digging into the weeds on the rest of our planning and preparation for the trip going forward. Expect our next post to be on fitness preparation for the hike. Thanks for reading! We appreciate any feedback and comments that you may have.
