Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Problems reserving camp sites...

I have a few questions about reserving camp sites at Whitney Portal. I have finally received my date for my day hike (yesterday) and have found that the night I need to camp at Whiney portal there are no remaining camp sites that are reservable.

Q1: Is it permitted to just sleep in your car at the parking lot? If not, what are my other options? We really want to sleep at 8000+ that night to help with the following day.

Q2: The reserveusa web page indicates that there is a site NS01 (non-specific) which "may or may not be reservable upon arrival". Does anyone know anything about this?

Q3: We would also like to camp at Whitney portal a second night and there are still some camp sites available on this day. However, I have tried several times to make the reservation and keep running into all kinds of problems such as "unable to make a secure connection" and "unable to access reserveusa host". Has anyone else run into this problem? Perhaps there is a phone number I can call instead of using the internet??

Thanks for any help with these issues!

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Technically, they don't allow you to camp at Whitney portal in your car. Usually it is not enforced and people do camp there..in Vans, campers and occasionally next to their car.

If you get there early (like 10 am on weekdays) there is a good chance you can get a walk in at the portal. We have done that. There are also some walk in group sites up there.

There are other camps...Lone Pine Campground (about 6000 feet) Tuttle Creek campground (about 5000 feet) and some even drive the 30 miles out of the way to Horseshoe meadows campsite (about 10000 feet). If you come from the North it is possible to camp up near Onion Valley (8000-9000 feet).

Either Doug Jr or Earlene (sp?) mentioned to me last Summer that the portal walk-in sites often go empty. Do I remember right, Doug? If so, then turning up early should give you a very good chance of getting a site.

Jeff

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Here's the deal...Only half the sites are reservable in the family campground. Go to the campground manager site about Noon get one of these multi-night campsites that are there for the taking, we did this twice on summer Friday's last year.

If you want only one night you got the hiker-in sites up by the trailhead. There are 16 of these.

Sleeping in your car...Yeah, you can do it but there is a lot of coming and going at all hours in Whitney Portal, plus the car isn't exactly a Serta Perfect Sleeper. It's my understanding they can cite you for sleeping in your car but I've only heard of it happening once.

An extra night at the Hiker-in...It depends how anal the campground manager is. If it's slow and they're nice you shouldn't have a problem but if busy and they're not you do have a problem if this is your plan.

Bill

Thanks for the helpful information. Our hiking permit is for a Saturday and I was able to get a camping permit for Thursday night so it doesn't sound like there will be too much difficulty getting a walk-in camp site for Friday night since we will be sleeping there the previous night.

Regarding my problems with reserveusa.com, I tried many variations on my web browser (tried 4 different ones on 2 different platforms!) with no luck. Finally I ended up calling them and this worked flawlessly. So much for technology!

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