Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board tent stakes

Can you drive stakes at trail camp or do you secure tent with rocks and rope?

We just loaded down the tarp with rocks and shoved the ends of the tent under heavy rocks. The ground is pretty rocky.

Though instead of staying in trail camp, I would suggest Outpost camp. Better camp ground, better weather and lower altitude so you can sleep and rest better. Couldn't sleep more than a couple of winks at trail camp.

We got maybe 50% of the stakes into the "ground" and piled rocks to secure the other points/lines of the tent. (See 2001 trip report under the "highpointing" section of my <a href="http://www.mtritter.org">WWW site</a>.) Not a problem...plenty of rocks around. Just be careful when you select your tent site...some of them drain, some of them turn into lakes if it rains. (I picked the right one...our neighbors didn't and got soaked overnight...)

Also, I'll have to disagree (respectfully) with "GonnaSummit" and say that I was very happy that we went all the way to Trail Camp. Fewer mosquitos than Outpost and cutting six miles off the summit day was critical to our making it up and off the summit before the afternoon t-storms popped up. We had acclimated a couple of nights at Mammoth Lakes (8,500') and hiked to 11,000' before we drove down to Whitney Portal, so we slept reasonably well even at 12,000' at Trail Camp.

Alan I have to agree with you that camping at Trail Camp instead of Outpost is a better choice. I think that camping at trail camp gives you a high altitude feeling and the views are much better. I went to a seminar about Whitney back in april and the speaker said that trail camp was the worst place to stay in the sierra. I liked trail camp a lot.