Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Recent MR trip reports?

On March 18-21, I'm going head up the MR with a guided group. Has anyone been up as far as Iceberg Lake recently?

With the El Nino weather pattern, snowpack is probably way above normal. I live in Las Vegas, and the local ski area has received 197" so far this winter. That's probably the most snow we've had since 2005.

Hi, this is my first post. Here it goes.

Just got down from a little day trip. I didn't go to Iceberg Lake though. I have a friend who got above iceberg Lake on Monday and he reported lots of snow. It was a windy day.

There's an SMI group up there right now. I guess the guides check in with the owner Kurt Wedberg. You might drop them an email. I'll bet there's someone around who can give you a pretty recent report.

Thanks for the update. Did your friend wear snowshoes the whole time, or did he switch to crampons at some point? I'm planning to bring snowshoes, poles, ice axe, and crampons next week.

According to the latest forecast, it will be much warmer next week, so maybe some of the surface snow will consolidate above Iceberg Lake.

He and his buddy were on skis so that probably doesn't help you much. The SMI group was wearing snowshoes. Without skis snowshoes are definitely the way to go.

If you're going with a guided group hopefully they told you what to bring. When I did the MR with SMI they gave me a thorough equipment list to follow.

Whooohoooo! North Fork, here I come.

If Kurt's got guides and clients up there, it's guaranteed that the route up to wherever they're camping is right on.

I'll have some photos of the conditions after the weekend.

Sky Pilot: I have checklists from SMI, SWS, and SMC. Also I have the checklists I used on Orizaba and Shasta.

Weather forecast still looks pretty good. The last time I tried the MR (April 2006), we had to turn around at 13200 feet due to heavy snow and avalanche danger. Hopefully we'll get to try "the final 400 feet" above the Notch this time.

-- interrupt unbridled glee --
It's reasonable to expect that the SMI group included people capable of making a proper evaluation of conditions and picking a safe route at the time they went up it. It's also reasonable to expect that they are also capable of evaluating conditions to pick a safe route at the time of their return. Wind, snow, sun and time will alter conditions. These factors are all available in considerable quantity on Whitney. Anyone choosing to follow a path on snow needs to be able to evaluate the conditions at that time and take along with them adequate ability to evaluate route choices at the time of their return.
-- resume unbridled glee --

Have fun on the mountain -and- come back.

Dale B. Dalrymple

Dale, I did something I've never done before...

None of us felt comfortable with this slope above UBSL (and apparently, neither did an earlier group), so we all avoided the slope by climbing thru the rocks between the usual route and the snowfield to the right.

The BC skier told me he was planning on digging a pit before skiing it on the way down. I didn't see any evidence of one on my decent (down the same rock route I climbed up).

Deb had asked me to stop by their camp on the way down to let them know what conditions I encountered. When I saw the sloughs towards the East Face, and knowing that they would probably be doing a pre-dawn start, I felt the need to stop by and fill them in on the unstable snow conditions.

Richard

Thanks for the report.

Dale B. Dalrymple

Picture of our tracks!! omg priceless!
Yes we did not feel comfortable with the slope, and also didn't feel comfortable with that big slope by Iceberg, so we climbed rock to avoid it.

For your trip bring snow shoes and crampons. On our trip it was nice and sunny friday, than at about 3:30pmweather changed and instead of 1 inch of snow, we got about a foot at night. If we didn't bring snow shoes we would have to turn around like another group we met. So id say it is better to bring a bit more than not bring it and not summit. Weather can change fast and forecasts don't get it right 100% of the time..