Rick of Best Hikes has posted a page telling all the nasty details about getting to the top of Mount Whitney. Why Rick likes the Whitney hike:
- no climbing gear needed
- surprisingly easy if you get good weather
- it’s a beautiful and impressive peak
- Whitney is on both the John Muir Trail and Pacific Crest Trails
- the Wilderness Permit is free
- you are only 76mi (123km) west of the lowest point in North America in Death Valley
- visiting the nearby Alabama Hills
- signing the summit register makes you feel an “alpinist”
It appears the authorities have devised the perfect fitness test for would-be Whitney hikers: if you can successfully navigate the internecine tangle of bureaucratic gobbledygook required to do the hike legally, you’re mentally alert enough to try the highest peak in the Lower 48.
Mt. Whitney is not actually on the Pacific Crest Trail. You can say you’ve hiked the entire PCT without having climbed Mt. Whitney. Most through-hikers do take an extra day and a half for the 14 mile, 4,000′ side trip to bag the peak. Whitney IS the official southern terminus of the JMT, however. You haven’t completed the JMT unless you’ve summited Whitney.
> You haven’t completed the JMT
> unless you’ve summited Whitney.
Last fall, a bunch of us got caught in a freak southern Sierra snowstorm (the storm was actually the remenants of hurricane Rita)
There were 4 of us holed up near Guitar Lake for a day waiting for the storm to break. The next morning we all plowed through about 18 inches of snow to get up and over trail crest. One of the 4 was a JMT thruhiker on the last leg of her trip- she missed completing the JMT by that last mile or two from trail crest to the Whitney Summit.