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Show Russell Jacobs 3 March 2010 So we made plans to meet at a certain time and he climbed from the eastern side, I from the western side, and meet in the middle where Charlotte Dome was located. So I went down ... MD: So you were doing Whitney first? RJ: Right. I'm on my way. I'd driving from Lake Tahoe and I drove down 395, past Bishop to the portal of Mount Whitney. You drive up a little ways to an elevation where there's parking and then you leave from there. That's where basically everyone leaves to do the regular hike. But as a climber, you take a very different route. They actually circle around, I believe, the south side of Whitney and access the summit from the south, maybe a little bit southwest side of Whitney. I've actually never done the hike. But my access to get to the east face is pretty, not many people go in this way. In fact, the only ones that do go in to climb just this one climb. I think there's other climbs in the area too, but this is, because it's documented as the fifty classic climbs of North America, it's been, once it's published, people have a tendency to gravitate to those published climbs as being classics. So I managed to hike back there. And I've got a bad leg. I mean it's atrophied, after a whole year, you're basically limping and it's quite a ways in there. It's a good ten miles back in there and you're foraging through in frost drainages and winding through, you know, cantilevered timber and bushwhacking some, but it's very pretty. Oh, I mean, it's just off the scale pretty. It opens up from place to place and there's meadows. Then you reach an area where you're above timberline. I'm all by myself. All by myself. And it's getting late, late in the evening, and I realized that I had forgotten my key to my Svea stove, so I have no means of regulating 14 |
