Clair at Mount Whitney
(Editor's Note: Chattanoogan Claire Henley started an adventure of a lifetime on the remote Pacific Crest Trail in April. Along the way, she had many adventures and found herself a husband named Big Spoon).
Two days after my spell of altitude sickness, Big Spoon and I reached the base of Mount Whitney. I felt much better now. My body had acclimated to the High Sierra, and I was ready to make the ascent up the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S. and stand at the tallest peak. It was a gray evening when we arrived to camp at Guitar Lake, 4 miles off the PCT. On the hike up, it hailed. The hail spilled down like crystal beads and pricked our hatted heads.
“All that snow up there is new,” a ranger coming down from Whitney said to Big Spoon and me. He wore heavy high top boots and was soaking wet. The ranger pointed to the mountain where a fresh layer of snow dusted the ridge. “If you two are planning to summit,” he warned, “you need to be very careful.”
That was the plan, to summit Mount Whitney. From Guitar Lake, the trail to the top switchbacked for 5 miles from 11,200 feet to 14,508. Big Spoon and I wanted a sunrise ascent. After a filling pasta dinner in the cold drizzling rain, we went to bed. It was 6:45. We woke at 1 a.m. Big blinking stars now shone in place of the rain. The sky between the stars rounded in a luscious black. It was 38 degrees out. Big Spoon and I layered up in thermals, gloves, fleece hats, and down jackets. We fitted our headlamps to our heads and filled our packs with enough food and water for the climb.
Dense snow smothered the trail. Only one other group traveled behind us. It was summertime, and because the Sierra had accumulated 6 percent of its average snowfall that year, Big Spoon and I weren’t prepared with crampons and ice axes. As we hiked, we kicked our tennis shoes into the slushy snow for solid footing; we stabbed our trekking poles into the slippery ground.
The trail shot up and up the steep and narrow ridge. We walked on cliff’s edge with drop-offs like black holes around every rock-faced bend. Halfway to the top, a rumbling sound like a jet roared in our midst. Big Spoon stopped to listen. I stood right behind. The noise continued to crackle down like rubble after an explosion.
“It’s a rockslide,” Big Spoon said. “Caused by the change in pressure on the rocks from the snow.” He looked up the mountainside and analyzed the snow speckled scree. “That’s frightening,” he said. “We have to be on our A-Game.”
We journeyed on and two miles from the summit, the snow became looser and more deep. It was 4 a.m. and still pitch black dark. We pushed on another half mile. I slipped on a hidden patch of ice and teetered to the side like a toddler. The terrain was becoming more intense: at 13,500 feet, it drastically narrowed to the width of one shoe. The jagged mountain rose on our right; on our left we skirted a void of doom. I slowly followed Big Spoon on a hundred foot stretch that felt like imminent death. Our shins sank into the snow as we leaned our bodies into the mountain. It was like tip-toeing on a tight rope without a net to catch us if we fell. My mother would have had a heart attack if she saw what we faced.
After completing that deadly strip, we stood on wider ground. We had 1,000 feet left to climb and shined our headlamps on the pitch ahead. Our lights revealed steeper, more treacherous terrain.
“I’m a risk taker,” Big Spoon turned to me and said, “but this isn’t worth the risk. I think we should turn back.”
My heart sank. But I completely agreed. With the darkness, snow, and lack of proper gear, it simply wasn’t worth it to keep trying for the top. On our way down I thought of what my dad–a pioneer of rock climbing in Tennessee–had always told me: “The wise adventurer knows when to call it a day.”
The sun rose as we reached the bottom of Whitney. The pale pink sky lit up the rising stone. Guitar Lake mirrored the sharp white slate. Back at our campsite we saw a herd of hikers begin their ascent. The snow was starting to melt, and with that amount of people going up, it would quickly get packed down, making the tricky sections of the trail easier to traverse.
“We were too ambitious to do a sunrise ascent,” I said to Big Spoon as the people whipped by. My competitive side was inflamed with envy and disappointment.
“We weren’t too ambitious,” Big Spoon consoled. “It’s just that, there come times when one must push on, but this was not that time.”
So it wasn’t our day to summit. But it was a bright and beautiful day in the Sierra nevertheless. As Mount Whitney became busier with foot traffic, Big Spoon and I walked around the lake and watched the rainbow trout chase each others’ tails. The fish swam like a dazzling dance and didn’t seem to mind if they couldn’t catch each other. Not everything had to be a victory after all.
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Claire's first book on her adventures while living in Colorado can be ordered here:
http://www.amazon.com/51-Weeks-The-Unfinished-Journey-ebook/dp/B00IWYDLBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394801373&sr=8-1&keywords=51+Weeks
In the snow at Mount Whitney