Kennedy Meadows to Mt. Whitney

The front of the Kennedy Meadows General Store was obscured by a few
old trees. To the right stood a rusting white pole with an equally
decrepit Shell Oil logo attached to the top. It drew your eyes down
towards a neglected list of gas prices, with only partial forms of
numbers revealing themselves. The old tank they stood guard beside was
empty, at least until the season picked up. The sky was a cloudless
blue, and as I took off my load, I heard a vaguely familiar voice
speaking German. It was coming from Lone Walker. Another hiker
interrupted my pausing revelation to ask, 'Have you seen Tiny ,
drinks, and an enormous stuffed Smokey the Bear doll with a contrived
six pack (This item will likely still be for sale at the Kennedy
Meadows General Store twenty years from now, and should remain the
only constant aspect of the otherwise ever-changing P.C.T.)' We
arranged for showers and laundry and went out to the deck where Steve
the Climber was flipping burgers on the grill. Steve had hiked some of the
trail last year and returned to this odd oasis to serve hungry hikers
and do odd jobs for this Tom. Incoming and existing hikers congregated
by the grill. We met Mother Moab and her twelve year old son Jayhawk
with a Mohawk, as well as Dustin from Massachusetts and his uncle
Curtis from Kashmir, WA.
J.R., who we met near the 58, was there, but wasn't staying with Tom,
who was being highly recommended by everyone after they asked about
Tiny Dancer. A fellow named Chris Knight strolled up, and shortly into
our conversation I discovered that he was dating a woman who used to
live in Cordova, AK, that I knew! It was the second small world
Cordova coincidence on the PCT, exactly 700 miles of trail after the
first one.
I walked around the building to get some laundry started and to get a shower.  There were two outdoor showers in wooden stalls.  I was in one, and two other hikers freshened up in the other... I don't think either of them were Tiny Dancer.
Outside the shower I finally met Tom, the operator of the hiker sanctuary down the road.  We talked fishing and the absence of Tiny Dancer, who he was supposed to drive down to Ridgecrest so she could get a flight out to Seattle.  He bought a large swath of property up here about five years ago, and set up some trailers for hikers when he found out that the trail passed by so closely.  Over the years, with the help of hikers, especially those who had longer stays than others, he had developed the property even more, adding a terraced outdoor movie theatre with a large piece of white painted plywood as a projector screen.  We hopped in the back of his truck and took the short ride to his place.
The closest trailer to the road, obscured by hammocks and two washers pits, was the 'comm center.'  Rather, it had four solar powered, donated laptops that hikers could use to catch up with real world.  Ryan and Chris took the beds in the back, and I slept on the couch right next to the row of computers.  We moseyed down to the kitchen area for dinner.  With all of the philanthropy going on here, we wanted to make sure we could contribute as much as possible for the short time we were going to be there, so we got to the know the workings of the kitchen and helped get dinner distributed to the ever growing number of hikers there.  We met some more of the main characters of Kennedy Meadows, including Slim, who had started the hike this year but was taking an extended rest after coming down very sick in the last section.  Curtis gave him some dog antibiotics near Walker Pass, which miraculously tided him over until he made it to Toms.  Moss Stationary had just arrived as well, and was waiting for supplies and a group to tackle the Sierras with.  I played baseball with Jayhawk, who was an avid soccer fan and apparently quite the long jumper.  After the nightly film, in which everyone fell asleep except for the three of us, we tucked in for what we expected to be our only night in Kennedy Meadows.
I awoke to two foreign hikers coming in to the computer trailer.  I rolled over as they scooted a couple of chairs towards the couch.  My face was mere inches from their behinds.  I opened my eyes again after about fifteen minutes and asked what time it was.
'Just now seven.'
'Seven... exactly?'
We helped out with Tom's famous pancake operation in the morning.  We took dishwashing duty with an old timer named Gray Ghost, who was close to eighty.  He was a Scandanavian fellow from the Midwest who had done the A.T. over the last few years.  
We milled around the property for the morning, playing washers and picking up on trail gossip.  Hanging out on the deck by the General Store waiting for the mail truck to come had become tradition for hikers in Kennedy Meadows.  Dustin and Curtis had been waiting for almost a week.  The grill was almost out of everything on the menu, but the hot dogs were palatable, and the tab increased quietly on a yellow legal pad out of sight in the store.  Over lunch, Ryan expressed worry, 'Are they going to get more food?'
It seems as if the rest of the world has forgotten that Kennedy Meadows exists. Perhaps it didn't know in the first place. Our boxes did not arrive.
Tiny Dancer did, however!  She was a short, red haired girl solo hiking the whole trail, but taking a couple of weeks off to let snow melt up ahead and attend a wedding back in Seattle.  She was also filming herself dancing at various spots around the trail, either by herself or with other hikers.  We did a Russian can-can in front of the store.
Don't Panic and Wing It arrived as well, they were both from Seattle and had completed the Triple Crown of thru-hikes, so their advice was wise and worth taking.  We relaxed in Steve the Climbers trailer, which was a semi-permanent residence.  Dustin picked up a guitar and started singing a twangy alt-rock country tune, mostly in the direction of his uncle, Curtis.  
'I can't go with you on your rock climbing weekend/
What if something's on TV... and it's just never shown again?
It's best I'm not invited, I'm afraid of heights/
I lied about being... the outdoor type.'
That night we watched a documentary about the P.C.T.  Buffalo, a hiker we had given a ride to Mojave from Tehachapi a week and a half earlier, showed up and complained that he had caught the same poison oak that we had.  I didn't finish the movie, because Chris came back to tell me that a mouse had just eaten a hole through his mattress and into his sleeping bag.  He and Ryan moved outside into the tent, but I considered the couch to still be safe, and fell asleep listening to the mice bang around on the kitchenette counter.
Tom took Tiny Dancer, Mother Moab, and Jayhawk down the mountain the next day.  We took full control of pancake duty, as we were now experts of the kitchen.  I added a little cinnamon to the recipe, and lots of extra butter, because you don't get many opportunities to please the crowd, so you have to take advantage when you get the chance.  Steve the Climber was back behind the grill, and we bought him bacon from the store so he could make us his famous 'Climber Burger.'
The Climber Burger consisted of three beef patties, with cheese between each layer, guacamole, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and special sauce.  It was a perfect meal before entering the Sierras, which also didn't happen that day, because only our food arrived, and we still had to wait for our winter gear and ice axes.
A crew of seasoned hikers returned from climbing Forester Pass the next morning, the tallest point on the P.C.T., and an especially difficult patch of trail during this record snow year.  We were hearing that this was the worst snow year on record since 1982, and the lingering winter could make it the longest lasting snowpack since the seventies.  The guides had some good advice on the conditions of the pass and which way to go when we got to the top, as well as what gear they found worked well and what didn't.
The rest of the day brought more dishwashing, more milling about, more ice cream sandwiches, and more absence of winter gear shipments.  From what the locals knew about the way mail worked around here, mail would have to go from Bakersfield to Ridgecrest, and then up to Kennedy Meadows, each step taking at least one day, maybe more.
Don't Panic and Wing It took off that day, but hikers were coming in at a faster rate than they were leaving.  Blaze from Canada arrived, among many others.  Tom's season was picking up, and it was clear that he had to be careful about how he doled out his nearly infinite kindness.  When Moss Stationary asked if he could pay to rip out map pages from one of Tom's P.C.T. books, Tom denied him for the understandable reason that he would have to go out of his way to buy a new one next time he was down in Ridgecrest.  Moss Stationary made the curious choice of saying that he had planned on just stealing the book, but figured he should try a more legitimate strategy first.  Obviously, this didn't go over well. Tom was a generous man, with a child-like gleam in his eyes, but he would not be walked on.
Our winter gear arrived the next day, and not a moment too soon.  Tom photographed us before we set off early that afternoon.  My pack weighed in at 45 pounds, due to the eleven days of food and added winter gear.  We made nine miles that afternoon, picking up the first few hundred feet of what would be endless climbing over the next few days, and crossing the swollen South Fork of the Kern River on a bridge.  We camped alongside a stream, grateful to start lightening our packs with the first dinner of the section.
We climbed about 600 feet to Monache Meadows.  The green, thriving valley flanked by gray, snow capped mountains reminded me a lot of Alaska.  So far, albeit less than twenty miles in, our Sierra experience was going swimmingly, and not nearly as snow covered as we had feared.  This would change soon, however, we were just under 8,000 feet, but had a 2,500 foot climb out of the meadow.  We crossed a bridge over the South Fork of the Kern River once again, this one made of steel and populated by dozens of barn swallows.  We climbed steadily up to about 10,400 feet and then descended very gradually to the edge of Gomez Meadow.  At the edge of the meadow was an old snag with a 19th century carving of a man smoking a pipe.  It was almost certainly left there by a Basque sheep herder.  Many herders from Andorra and the surrounding Pyrennes Mountains immigrated to the Owens Valley and made their living taking their livestock up to the high meadows of the well watered Sierras to graze, using the same passes that hikers essentially still used today to resupply in the valley.  I stopped in the middle of the meadow to stretch out for a second, that first big climb and subsequent rest had left my left leg pretty tight.  I sat and enjoyed the scenery and chirping birds for about five minutes, then noticed something a bit larger than normal working its way across the marshy flat.  It was a beaver, at nearly 9,000 feet!  It stopped and stared at me for a moment, and then went about its business.  The tail was smaller than that of Alaskan beavers I had seen, but I was thrilled for the rare chance to see one here in the Southern Sierras.
 
It started to snow as we set up camp next to Dry Creek and awoke the next morning to a light layer of snow. Although the snow was slowing us down considerably now as our average elevation hung well above 9,000 feet, I could still appreciate the beauty of the Sierras with the pleasing contrast of white (snow), green (pines), blue (sky), and gray (cliffs). We had several lower passes to climb up that day, the first dropping us into a meadow where the streams only peeked out from a few collapsed sections of snow. Cottonwood Pass was our first 11,000+ of the Sierras, and we had to plan the ascent with the GPS from a preceding ridge. Any sign of trail was rare out here. We climbed atop a rock outcropping after defeating the pass, taking in the vast view as our confidence was peaking. We were exhausted from a day of lots of ups and downs in elevation, but had to traverse a long ridge to get to a lower spot to camp. It was getting late, and the sun was setting, but this made for one of the most memorably pretty patches of hiking this whole summer. We bouldered over sharp, golden rocks, tip toed across shimmering icy crests of the ridge, the experience overpowered my sore muscles. The moment was interrupted when I slipped and fell off a rock, but the deep soreness had subsided by the time I got out of the tent the next morning, hardly rested from a chilly, windy night.
Halfway through the next day we ran into Blaze, right after climbing out of Death Canyon (Hardly formidable compared with what was ahead.). We decided to climb Mt. Whitney with him the next day, and hurried to keep up with his fast paced, ultra light pace along the slopes to Crabtree Meadow. The snow was getting mushy by mid-morning, and in the afternoon we were often postholing to our calves. I hit a soft spot by a tree coming down and fell in up to my chest. I had thought simply hiking was good exercise, pulling yourself out of snow every ten steps was even more taxing. We were lucky to find a small snow free patch of ground in the meadow, and set up camp early to prepare for our ascent of Mt. Whitney the next day. Blaze told us stories of hiking in Alberta and we ogled his food that looked so much tastier than my boring potatoes and beef with onions.
The summit of Whitney is 8.7 miles off trail, but since it's the tallest point in the Lower 48, it's well worth the bonus miles. We were lucky to be with Blaze, because the trail to the Western face was almost completely under snow, and none of the waypoints were loaded on our GPS. Blaze had hiked this section last year, so he knew roughly which way to go. We climbed out of the meadow along a river, which we had to cross twice. The first crossing was a slick log that had iced over in the night. The second crossing didn't present itself so obviously as we made our way up. Blaze chose a daring leap across the water onto a snow cornice that he grabbed onto and pulled himself up on. Personally, I was a little shocked at the choice when there were plenty of less precarious options around. Ryan and Chris successfully followed Blaze, but I shook my head and found a much nicer crossing only a few hundred feet up where a stump had lodged in the water.
The approach rises up to a shelf below the form of the mountain. If it wasn't such a bizarre year, we would be treated by views of Guitar Lake. Instead, we carefully traversed above it on an icy slope, then slogged across the saddle before the lake to the bottom of the towering face. We were surrounded by sharp peaks on all sides. Mt. Whitney is really no more than a high point along a spindly ridge with a bit of a fade to it. While the view was stunning, the upcoming path was clearly going to be treacherous.
Honestly, it was obvious right then and there that it was way too early to climb the mountain from this side without crampons and rope. We would need to cut steps and zig zag up icy snow chutes that had buried the switchbacking trail. It was still quite early in the morning and the sun hadn't touched this face since mid afternoon the previous day. However, we were four boys, so our decision making was predictably unsound, so we started up the mountain, tightly gripping our ice axes. Since my mother reads this (and is, perhaps, the only person reading this), I'll spare the gory details of the slow, deliberate ascent. Each step was a summit in itself. My ice axe aged like a fruit fly on meth, going in shiny and new, and coming out etched, scratched, and gouged. Military jets flew in formation back and forth over the mountain as we climbed. After a few thousand feet the trail (if you could see it) meets up with the trail coming over from the Owens Valley side of the mountain. From there it calms down for a spell, winding right below the spine of the ridge heading North towards the peak. This is one of the most captivating stretches of trail you'll ever walk on, but it did take some care in the snow. The trail reaches the final push to the summit, which in this situation was a maddening fight with another sheet of icy snow. I was worn down and running off of sheer will, scrambling and kicking tiny footholds up to the plateau. The last hundred feet are a gentle crest to the top of California, at 14,505 feet. The mountain has a nearly 10,000 foot prominence on the east side, as this is the edge of the Sierra Block which is tipped up Westward towards the San Joaquin Valley. Clouds obscured all but a glimpse of the Owens Valley, but the view to the West was truly endless.
The stone hut built by the Sierra Club in the early 1900's after the first lightning death on Whitney was filled inside with snow. During the high season the Forest Service pays to helicopter a port-a-potty up and down from the summit weekly, but it was still too early for that. There were a few day hikers from the Owens Valley side shuffling through as well. We enjoyed the top, and began our descent right before noon.
The trip down was as hairy as the trip up, perhaps more so. Chris took a spill but luckily escaped with mere flesh wounds all over his arms. It started to snow as we got back to camp, and we encountered first a group of four hikers, and closer to our camp a convoy of ten PCTers, mostly friendly faces we knew from Kennedy Meadows. We would learn later that out of the 14, only one would attempt the Whitney summit the next day. Considering the weather and existing trail conditions, I would have felt fine making the same choice.
Nonetheless, we did what we did, and got away with it. As Chris said, 'I think we just climbed Whitney on Expert.'
There is little rest for the weary, Forrester Pass beckoned the next morning. We camped early with Blaze and swapped more stories as Crabtree Meadows sank deeper beneath early June snow.