We hiked this peak on Saturday as our final training hike before our August 18th day hike on Whitney. For those who have not done this before, this is a fantastic place and I strongly recommend giving it a try.
We drove up from SoCal on Friday afternoon and spent the night at a hotel in Lone Pine. We left the hotel around 4:00 AM and arrived at the trailhead at Barcroft Gate at 6:10 AM. This is a LONG drive and the last 17 miles are on a dirt road that is almost all washboard. I followed advice that we had received from this board and took our Excursion instead of a passenger car and I was very glad that we did. We started our hike at 6:30 AM. It was 35 degrees with a solid frost. We reached the peak at 10:10 AM and spent 20 minutes up there taking pictures and talking with a delightful couple who were up there as part of their effort to visit the highest point in every county in California. They had an old book that listed these points and how to get to them. Very cool. We left the peak at 10:30 AM and arrived back at the car at 1:10 PM. Total time gone was 6 hours 40 minutes; total hiking time was 6 hours and 20 minutes.
This trail is about 14.5 miles r/t and spends all of its time between 12,000 feet at the start and the 14,246 feet at the peak. As such, it was a great test of how we would do at altitude. None of the 3 of us had any issues.
This trail is entirely above tree line and the views are indescribable. What a fantastic place! There was one snow patch near the peak that we needed to scramble up 40 to 50 feet of rock to get around but it wasn't difficult to do so. Even though there is only about 2500 feet of elevation difference on this trail, it goes over a couple of ridges that need to be climbed on the return trip. These caused our altimeter to track about 3400 total feet of climbing on the round trip route. This route looks very easy in pictures but we found it to have a couple of places that had our legs talking to us a bit. The first was the set of swithbacks from the final saddle up to the peak and the other two were on the way back down. These were the climb going back up the ridge from that same saddle below the peak and the climb over the final ridge up to the Barcroft Observatiory. None of these looked like that big of a deal but when they are included in a 14 mile plus hike at this altitude I guess they get a little tougher.
This was the final training hike in what, for us at least, was a fairly aggressive training schedule. For the past 15 weeks we have averaged 16.5 miles of hiking every Saturday with an average elevation gain of just over 5,000 feet. Our hikes took us onto Baldy 3 times, San Gorgonio twice, Iron Mountain, Cactus to Clouds, Charleston Peak and White Mountain. Now we rest and look forward to a great day on Whitney!
Cheers,
RV
