Mount Whimsey by Don Taco

 Mount Whimsy                                                                               2021 by Don Taco

  We must have climbed Mt. Whitney as young Boy Scouts, because I remember knowing about the trail, though that would have been an ambitious project. The well-known trail to that peak, the highest in the continental US, is a superhighway known as 99 Switchback Trail, which is literal. It doubles back on itself that many times in order to gain the needed elevation in the available terrain. It is packed with tourists, boy scouts, families, girl scouts, wedding parties, knitting clubs, and so on, many of whom you would never expect to see attempting a diffficult climb. It is crowded. It is busy. It is full, most all the time, if the weather is tolerable. It isn't actually a dificult climb. It is almost tedious, because, with all the doubling back, the scenery doesn't change very quickly, and exciting new vistas come along very slowly. And it's not that much fun to be part of such a crowd, when your actual goal is to get out into nature and enjoy the beauty and the solitude.

  It happened, though, that someone had told Pat about another trail, and he proposed that we take this other path and climb Mt. Whitney. We were prone to adventure, Pat and Joe and I, and did a number of trips such as this, and so we made our plans. Gathered the gear, planned the meals, loaded the packs, jumped in the station wagon. At the trailhead, after parking with the other hundreds of cars, we followed the rather vague instructions, which turned out to be accurate, and headed away from the main trail into the next valley over. And off we went.

 

  There was no trail. Nor signs of travelers. There were ducks, piles of three stones, unlikely to occur naturally, an ancient marker system that periodically indicated that you were still headed the right direction. If you went a long time without seeing one, you doubled back and figured out where you went wrong. We only went wrong once, but that comes later in the tale. We had the entire valley to ourselves, as far as we could tell, making for a very pleasant trip. What we ended up doing, it turned out, was following a different valley on another side of the mountain up to a low point in a ridge, which was a broken pile of boulders ranging in size from Volkswagens to apartment complexes. The other side of the ridge led down to Guitar Lake and the meadow on the other side of Whitney, which was where the trail to the peak went next, so we then turned around, climbed to the top, and followed the superhighway back down. 

  

  I don't recall how many days we spent on the trip. At least three, less than a week. The first thing we did that wasn't just following the terrain and the ducks was when we discovered that the path to follow seemed to include a bit of a cliff. There were cracks and handholds, and it looked do-able, so up we went. Some water dripped down the face, making it clumsy in places, and it was late enough in the day to be losing the sun, making it cold. Then we got to a spot where you couldn't go up. You had to wedge your foot in a crack and reach around the crag to get your other foot in the next crack over. But the distance was such that your first foot would now be twisted sideways enough so that it wouldn't come free. We each tried it several times, and then had the sense to try it without our packs. In retrospect, we had absolutely no business on that cliff face without ropes and some training. One of us eventually got it just right, and followed the next crack up to the next ledge. We handed up all the packs, and then the other two managed the dangerous slide around the crag. Not much further, and we were in a nice flattish place, had dinner in the failing light, and set up camp. After breakfast in the morning, we headed out, and had not travelled as much as half an hour, when we could see how the land really lay, there, and that we should have easily and quickly walked around the cliff. 

  A day or more later, I forget exactly, we found ourselves at the bottom of the aforementioned pile of enormous broken rocks, and at a small lake. Having been out a few days, we got bold, and jumped in to wash up. I would never have imagined that water could be so cold and still be liquid. Our dip was very brief. And then, as the afternoon wore on, the shadows fell, and the temperature dropped, we scrambled from boulder to boulder, attempting to find paths that kept bringing us closer to the top. When we achieved that goal, and looked down into the next valley, the sun had not set on that side of the ridge, and our dark, chilly evening magically became a balmy late afternoon. Possibly the most interesting instant transformation I ever witnessed.

  From that vantage point, Guitar Lake, far below us in the big meadow, is actually shaped like a guitar. When you look at it on a map, the resemblance is much vaguer. Also, just below us, was a tiny jewel of a lake, that perfect clear blue that a snow-melt lake has, undisturbed by the silt of a river running through it. The slope of the hillside is much gentler on this side, a phenomenon of mountain ranges that is due to their formation, but not easy to recognize due to their size and our lack of the proper vantage point. I live in the Cascades, of course, and those are formed one by one, like pimples, as a hot spot in the earth pushes material upward and forms a cone. Mountain ranges, however, are formed by two plates shoving against each other, and one side gets lifted as the other pushes under it. Big mountain ranges also have a ripple effect that creates a series of smaller mountain ranges nearby, all in a row. You can see this in Great Basin National Park, where there are eight or nine ranges all caused by the formation of the Rockies, an enormous range. Mountain ranges thus have a steep side, which we had just climbed, and a gentle side, which we had just discovered. You can see this difference quite clearly if you come up Tioga Pass from 395 and then drive down through Yosemite. And then it all gets disguised by erosion. Astonished by the beauty of this tiny lake, we hiked down to it. Reaching it, we could now see that there was a second tiny jewel of a lake a bit further down. And, at that one, we could see the third. A series of seven of these gorgeous lakes revealed themselves one by one, like a string of pearls, as we hiked down into the valley, with Guitar Lake far off in the distance below us the whole time.

  After a night in the meadow, we headed up the trail to the peak. The view is worth all the trouble and more. And, at 14,494 feet, the air is quite thin. We smoked a joint, of course, and got quite giddy. Then we headed out, giggling and laughing and jumping from rock to rock, until we tired a bit of the fun, and stopped to catch our breath. After a minute, another couple caught up to us, just as we were saying, "Well, we curled in from that direction, and then went this way, so we need to head over there to find the trail again." The couple freaked out. They had followed us, assuming we were following the trail, and were aghast that we weren't. They seemed to be near panic, and were very angry with us, which we were having a hard time trying not to seem highly amused by. So we headed out, them following again, and after half an hour or so, were on the actual trail again. We took a break, to let them get away from us, something they obviously wanted very badly and couldn't do fast enough.

  Since we had come up from the meadow, rather than following one of the sensible prescribed routes, we were at the peak later in the day than most trips, and did not have enough daylight to get very far down the mountain. We ended up stopping at 12,000 Camp, which you've already guessed is at 12,000 feet. It's a sensible enough campsite, but for the wind. Located on a bare rock shoulder of the mountain, the wind comes screaming through, and there is no protection from it. Every rock and small boulder that can be found has been piled up into small walls, but that late in the day, people are already huddled in their sleeping bags behind all of the best ones, for what little help can be gotten against the viciousness of the wind, which swirls around and ignores the rocks anyway. We found a meager bit of protection, climbed into our own bags fully clothed, as close as we could to each other, and piled everything we had, packs included, on top of us, to maintain as much body warmth as we could. I believe that is as cold as I have ever been, except possibly for the trip to Utah, between Christmas and New Year's, when we drove Pat's sister back to her college, and were careless enough to run out of gas one night. Coincidently, or not, that adventure involved the same three of us, as did the trip to the Gulf side of Baja California, a few years earlier, when we were almost busted for the three fifty-pound sacks of steer manure that we did not realize Pat's mom had bought and left in the rear underseat compartment of the family station wagon. But that's another story, and we weren't cold on that trip. In the Utah adventure, we even unfolded every map in the glove compartment and spread them out over us, trying to stay warm with every tool we had. At Whitney, I'm not sure we even slept. 

  And the next day was just a long boring hike back down to the crowded parking lot, an actual resaurant meal, the drive home, and off to the next adventure.