As I mentioned, I was eager to summit Whitney early the next day. I didn’t sleep particularly well this night and rose around 2:15 AM to have some breakfast and get packed up. I started hiking around 3:45 AM and set a brisk pace up to Trail Crest, arriving there in about 75 minutes where I unloaded my pack and headed for the summit, with the weather looking acceptable.

I summited Whitney right on schedule, around 6 AM and stopped for a few pictures. Here’s the view to the north with Mount Russell in the foreground and Mount Williamson in the distance.

Looking south to Trail Camp and Mount Langley in the distance.

Looking south from the trail just below the summit to my next goal: Mount Muir, a class 3 scramble about 300 feet up from the main trail.

The summit view from Mount Muir back past the needles to Mount Whitney. The scramble up Mount Muir required a little bit of route finding and was, in my opinion, a little bit more difficult than class 3, requiring some stemming and mantling moves up onto ledges. But, that said, it wasn’t so difficult that it felt sketchy. The views of Mount Whitney were fantastic, and despite seeing hundreds of signatures in the Whitney summit register for each of the previous days, there were only two in Muir’s summit register from the previous day.

On my way down, I saw someone eyeing me on the descent. I wanted to make sure they didn’t think the peak I was on was Mount Whitney, so I hustled down to chat with them. Turned out they knew where they was going and was staying low to avoid rockfall (smart) and get some beta. When I got down, they headed off for a summit attempt.

As I continued descending, the sun started to hit the Hitchcock Basin and the Kaweahs, which made for some beautiful pictures.

At Trail Crest, as I repacked my things, a guy strolled by, lit cigarette in hand and nonchalantly said “there’s gonna be lightning before noon today” as he continued to the summit.

The route down to Outpost camp was fairly treacherous. My feet were sore, and the 6,000’ downhill was getting to me, so I took it a bit easy. About halfway down, I spotted the climber on the summit of Mount Muir. Down farther, a helicopter was buzzing around in the basin, and none of the hikers seemed to know why. Turns out, it was keeping an eye on the nearby Georges Fire, which was ignited by the thunderstorm the previous day.

On my way down, I ran into a Forest Service ranger who permit checked me. Funny that I had already seen two SEKI rangers who didn’t bother asking, but once I entered the very popular Whitney Zone, they were checking everyone. I suppose they have to, or the area would be even more overrun than it is now.

I made my way down to Whitney Portal, tired but pretty satisfied. I had put away 194 miles with 39,000’ of climbing in 7 days. In the middle 5 days, I had averaged 31 miles a day with 6,000’ of climbing. While it had been tough, it wasn’t as tough as I initially feared. I had done it.