I often drive north on Highway 395 to go skiing at Mammoth Mountain in central California. The road skirts the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, and as you head north the peaks rise in a kind of escalating drama—first modest, then jagged, then improbably snow-capped and theatrical. It's a slow unfolding of granite ambition.
The scale is deceptive. In the Owens Valley, mountains in the foreground block even larger mountains behind them. You think you're looking at the main attraction, but you're actually staring at the sideshow.
Such is the case with Mt. Whitney. From the highway near Lone Pine, you'd hardly know that—at 14,505 feet—it's the tallest peak in the United State's lower 48 states. You catch a glimpse of its jagged approaches, but it doesn't loom the way you expect a record-holder to loom. Whitney hides behind lesser peaks like a wallflower at junior prom.
Recently I took a side trip into the Alabama Hills, just below Whitney's eastern rise. Dozens of Westerns were filmed there—Gunga Din, How the West Was Won, even bits of Tremors. The rounded boulders look as though a giant casually dropped a sack of stone marbles across the desert. Amid those wind- and water-carved formations stands a natural rock arch, shaped over millions of years.
Through that arch—perfectly framed—rises a wintry Mt. Whitney, its jagged ridgeline taking bites out of the sky, snow streaming between the teeth.
A few summers ago, my friend Chuck and I drove up Whitney Portal Road as far as the road allowed, to Whitney Portal Campground at 8,300 feet. The summit still towered more than 6,000 feet above us and roughly eleven miles away by trail. We hiked a mile up the trail toward Lone Pine Lake, an alpine lake surrounded by forested hillsides and cathedral granite walls.
We went no farther, but that night, back at the campground, we sat by the fire and watched tiny bobbing lights high on the mountain—late-returning hikers who had started before dawn for the twenty-two-mile round trip to the summit and back. They looked like fireflies drifting along the spine of the Sierra.
I've never climbed Mt. Whitney. But I've scaled it from the highway, from the Alabama Hills, from the campground, and from the glow of other people's headlamps. I've even seen photos of the small stone hut on the summit.
Someday I may make the climb. Until then, Mt. Whitney remains undefeated—and I remain comfortably below it.
Top Photo: Penny Higgins
