The 5 of us started planning this trip around December. Jim flew in from VA Beach, Adam, Nick, and JJ flew in from Sylvania, OH, and I flew in from Kalamazoo, MI. We camped the first night at the portal and around 0730 we set out for Iceberg lake. The ledges were a pretty good time except for all the red ants attacking us.
We encountered snow a little prior to LBSL. There we talked briefly with two other guys who said the turned around on the chute due to knee high snow. We put our crampons on and continued. It began to snow pretty hard.
After arriving at Iceberg around 5pm we set up our tents and tried to get warm. Everyone seemed a little tired but overall in good condition. Adam had a slight headache when he went into his tent and so did I. An hour or so went by and Nick came into my tent saying that Adam is really sick. I went to check on his in his tent, he was sweating, shaking, and unresponsive. I tried to get him dressed so we could get lower but it was no good. It was almost pitch black out and we didn't have many options. I took Adam's phone to the hill facing east and called 911. I got disconnected several times and was getting pretty frustrated. Apparently the 911 service in the area is handled by dispatchers in Las Vegas and that caused a lot of confusion as well. Finally I got transferred to the Lone Pine sheriff's office and the said they would send help. I got about a half an hour of sleep. We watched Adam throughout the night. When morning came he seemed to be doing a little better but could not move far without the symptoms returning. The Inyo SAR team showed up around 730am just as we were going to start heading down. The said that they had a chopper would be inbound in a few hours. The rest of our party decided to continue to the summit and we would meet Adam at the Portal.
It took us a long time to get to the notch. The only other tracks leading up belonged to the two we met at LBSL earlier and it appears they tried to stick to the rocks more. We zig zagged up sticking mostly to the parts covered in snow. Once at the notch I could see the steep gully way up was not practical with all the snow on it. We traversed west in knee to waist high snow. We finally made the summit. My brother and I wished our lil cousin happy birthday in this photo.
The plan was to head down on the main trail the same day. But it took so long getting up, the sun was setting. The Main trail was so covered in snow we spent two hours just trying to find where it connected to the summit. We never did find it. The next morning we knew people would start looking for us if we did not return but we had no other option. It was really really cold. We decided it was best to sleep on the summit in the stone shack. It was actually rather nice up there. It was warmer in there than in our tents the night before. We woke the next morn and set out. We could see a faint outline of the trail that ran along the back of the needles so we made a strait line for that from the summit. Once we got there it was not any better. The snow was knee to waist deep. It took us about an hour to move 1 mile. Finally we made it to trail crest. We were dead tired and had had enough trail blazing. We saw a climber coming strait up by trail crest and decided to take a break and wait for him. He got to the top about and hour and a half later and was nice enough to give us some food and good advice. We opted to glissade down the mt to save some time and get to a phone. We hiked out stopping to chat along the way. It felt good to get back to the car. Adam was waiting for us at the bottom and we made some phone calls and got some much needed food. It was an awesome trip.
*****Special thanks to the INYO SAR crew. They hiked 8 hours overnight to reach our camp on wed morn*******
Adam wants another shot at the summit so I think I'll be returning with him in a few months. I'll be collecting everyones photos and storing them in my photobucket account if you want to check them out. I only have a few now but in a week I should have plenty. Here is a link to my pics.
http://s295.photobucket.com/albums/mm153/rockviper1/?start=all 
