Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Friends In High Places

Walked up on Chris(?) and Deb guiding three clients near UBSL today.

Made for a much more pleasant day, especially since I had no snowshoes with me. They made a great camp a ways above UBSL. Stopped and ate lunch at the camp on the way down from "almost" Iceberg and passed on some info on the route up and a couple of sloughs that I saw near the East Face.




Amazing spindrift show off of the crest, but the drainage was nearly calm.


There were at least 20 people up the North Fork. AND, for the most part, everybody was sticking to the same track for a change!


The rest of the TZ5 photos.

I'll have a POV album and "movie" up in a while.

Richard

Did you meet any young russian guys up there? Vitaliy, Max?? just glad to see they had good weather . . . not too happy that I had to back out, though. Bummer.

Thanks,
Bob

Thanks, Richard. Beautiful photos, as usual. I love those sunrise pics, and the one of Thor with Whitney in the background with the spendrift.

There were two guys with accents headed for the East Buttress and I had a couple of conversations with a skier (who was in a party of 4) who also had an accent. I didn't ask any of their names.

Thanks, Wayne. BTW, I haven't heard from Mike lately.


POV photo album and "movies."

Richard, thanks for the update. How long did it take you to hike to Whitney Portal (on the way up)?

Richard, that young man of mine has been over in Japan, but he is back now. He seems to have marriage on his mind. I guess we need to get him re-directed to the real priorities, right?

I little under an hour-and-a-half at a leisurely pace.


Wayne, good for him!

As we say, the mountains will still be there.

Awesome photos Richard (as usual). Beautiful. I'm surprised you didn't ski down..looks like conditions were perfect for that (?)..

Thanks for sharing.

Chris

Thanks Chris.

It was about as good as it gets for skiing: 6-12 inches of fluff on top of a fairly hard crust. I'm sure the BC skier that I talked to had a heck of a good time on the way down.

I haven't skied in nearly a year, so I'm a little gun-shy about taking them up into the backcountry.

as a general rule, if there is a wind advisory for owens valley is it to be ignored if youre in the canyons?If i hadnt seen it pasted all over noaa website i wouldnt be sitting at home stewing.

Good morning Richard,
POV movie is very good. It must have been taking a lot of efforts of your part. It makes me feel like I am really hiking on the trail and gave me a very good idea of over-all trail condition and what to expect. The distance between parking and trail head is most discouraging hike by looking at POV movie.
Thank you again.
Shin

my two Russian friends made it to the summit, then came down. what wind?

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=366209477269&ref=mf

You were there Saturday?! WOW What a small world. Skier you met (his name was Yason) was in our group (4-Max, Bryan, Vitaliy=me, and Yason). We camped right next to the 2 guides and their 3 clients (from philadelphia I believe) at LBSL friday night..on Saturday we 3 except Yason summited at 3:19..left LBSL at 8:30 (late because of the stormy night with a new foot of snow or so)..we broke trail all the way up and had summit to just 3 of us! Crazy thing was that on the ascent it was blowing like hell, but on the summit itself it was like at the beach on a nice day!! It was my 1st time to this mountain, it is beautiful, and I hope to come back again...
One of those 2 guys goin for EB was Russian from Moscow, we also had a conversation with him on our way down. But I don't think we met you, since we only met 2 guys at UBSL who gave up on their summit attempt, and we met a group of 3 on friday, but think they also gave up because we didn't see them on our way up.
Some pics, if you could see them...and I took more video so want to put it all together..

Vitaliy, congratulations on making it to the summit. During the past few weeks, there have been very few trip reports on this message board. When was the last entry in the log-in book, prior to your climb?

THERE WAS NO BOOK!!!!! It was the only thing that I did not like about the trip, since it was my 1st trip, I summited and I really wanted to sign the book as one of the not so many winter summits, and check out how many people summit during winter...
So at 1st I thought the book was under the snow on north side of the house, Iwas digging and only found rocks..than we went on the other sign and I saw the place where the book was supposed to be. opened it, and all i saw was stickers!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?page=5&aid=151380&id=515072269#!/photo.php?pid=3377440&id=515072269

Does anyone know why wasn't the book there? And how many people usually summit during winter?

Vitaliy, nice pics, congrats on a fine summit!

Shin, it's actually pretty simple. I just put the thing in Interval Mode, taking 1 photo per minute. (I carry 7 batteries now and they are really light and allow me to "run" for 14-21 hours.) When I get home, I import the photos into Lightroom using Auto Tone and then export them at 50% quality. For the album, I prune out the out-of-focus photos and post the rest. The "movies" are created using QuickTime. All you have to do is "tell it" where the first photo in the sequence is and it does the rest. I split this POV into an Up and Down sequence since SmugMug won't let me do more than 10 minutes of video per file. The new quad-core processor does speed things up compared to my older systems.

Congratulations to those that made the summit last weekend. Glad the wind dropped off at the summit.

Wow, great summit shots! Congratulations for doing that in such fierce winds.

I made a semi video/trip report

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2W55sYDcN8

Thanks for the video. I gather the red line above the notch was your ascent route. Why that way instead of up the chute?