I had been wanting to attempt Whitney for some time. In 1998 I got some permits, was ready to go, decided to go water skiing the week before, and broke my finger. So much for that trip. In 1999, I planned a trip again when my wife was having her friends over for the weekend. It wasn't very organized but it was still fun.

The first person I talked into the trip was Steve, whom I work with.

The second person was Shane. He got a cheap ticket at the last minute and flew out from Minnesota the Wednesday before the climb. This was cool since we hadn't been climbing together for almost 2 years. I wish we would have had more time since we only climbed Whitney while he was here. I wanted to get him out to Josh, Williamson, and a bunch of other places.

On Friday, July 9, 1999, Steve and I left work in early afternoon. We swung by my house and picked up Shane. We loaded all the gear into Steve's car and we were off. We drove down the 91 to the 15 and then got on the 395 in Victorville. Check out www.395.com . They have links for just about anything you want to do on the 395. It is a good place to start if you want to find info on particular climbing areas and such.

Back to the subject, we pulled into Lone Pine about 9:00 PM. We got some food and called home to let them know we made it. It started pooring and we actually lost power in town for a few minutes. We finished the food and started heading up the road to the trail head for the night. We got a few miles out of town and the road was just covered with rocks. Shane and I got out of the car and started moving them so we could get through. It was still raining hard. Rocks were falling almost as fast as we were removing them. We decided to head back, there was just to much to be moved.

As we were heading back down the mountian, we saw the road crew on the way up to clear the road.

Our next issue was "Where the hell are we going to sleep?". We opted for the ranger's station. We just threw our bags down on the sidewalk and slept for a few hours. During the night several others came by to pick up permits, etc. Two other guys even joined us on the sidewalk.

About 5:00 or so, we got up and went down to Carl's Junior for Breakfast. Shane had eaten his last 9/10 meals at Carl's. He misses them since he moved from Arizona to Minnesota.

We headed back up to the trail head. No rocks this time.

Here is a pick of us at the trail head

We headed out. As we were going up we ran into several parties bailing. They had been camping, some as high as Iceberg Lake, during the night's storm. There were reports of snow up at Iceberg. We got some good beta from the people coming down. We were carrying ice axe and crampons but most people said we could traverse around the ice feilds on the route.

Here is the stream crossing. Hang a right directly after the crossing to get on the Mountaineers route.

Here are some pictures of us on the ledges

Here Shane and I are by Lower Boyscout.

Here we are on the way to Upper BoyScout

Can you see me in this picture? I started dragging really bad. To much of an altitude change for me in one day. I kept going anyway.

In this picture, I am so far back you can't really see me. This is the stream going from Upper Boyscout to Lower. Because of the rain and such, the streams really started going as the day went on.

I know I was feeling pretty crappy by this point. I stopped at Upper Boyscout, got some food, water, and asprin. This helped a bit. We all headed out to get to Iceberg. Steve was feeling a lot better than Shane and I. He went on ahead and made it to Iceberg. Shane and I think we were extremely close before we headed back. This is what is looked like when we turned back.

It should look like this

We all met up again at Lower Boyscout serveral hours later. We thought Steve may be dead. Parties were coming down and asking if we were with Steve. They said he was waiting at Iceberg for us. We were hoping he was coming down. He eventually showed up. We all limped back to the car. It was a rough day. The rain really sucked. We will try again next time.

We stayed the night in Lone Pine and then headed back to Orange County on Sunday.