Lone Pine Peak

Trailhead: Whitney Portal

Elevation: 12949

Route: North Ridge

Difficulty: 5.7 Grade III

Lone Pine Peak is the first peak you see when approaching Whitney Portal and is often mistaken for Whitney itself despite being much lower elevation. It is also notable for being one of the apple screen savers so I'd seen the route many times on a monitor at work before viewing it in person. The warnings on this peak are intense probably because the route is very long and many people have gone off route. But for us it was an easy day climb and absolutely delightful. Would recommend downloading a gpx track of the descent before hand.

There's some comfort in knowing that you are closing off options, isn't there? I think I always expect it to be stressful, but it's easier to have one option than to constantly be choosing between multiple paths. 

We've just broken out the rope to climb a class 5 pitch on the north ridge of lone pine peak. It's a skinny 30 meter rope and I don't trust it at all, certainly not to rappel this 800 meter + route. And now that we’re in class 5 territory, it’s becoming harder and harder to retreat.

On the start of the ridge

Retreat is only on my mind because I’ve read too many great trip reports about LPP. It seems to be a popular place to get benighted. Parties get lost on the ridge, stuck in harder terrain, and end up sleeping among the rocks. Or they summit successfully and get lost on the descent and end up wandering in the scree chutes as darkness falls.

GG has an uncanny sense of route, and at the next steep section he sets up below a steep corner. Due to the angle and multiple roofs, I can’t see much of the pitch but he guesses that it’s the entry to the 5.7 lieback move that guards the summit of the 3rd tower. I climb up with my dental floss rope, smearing my approach shoes against gold granite. At about 50 feet up the pitch I realize I don’t have any protection in and GG is shouting that I’m nearly out of rope. Huh. I feel that prickle of fear. I see the pitons guarding the lieback above me. I can’t make it there with this mini rope. I see a flake to my left that I want to belay off. I shake off the inertia, place two cams under the roof, and traverse left to the belay. Wow, I think, I’m such a weenie! Scared on 5.5. Maybe it’s the hugeness of this ridge compared to the shortness of my rope…

GG comes up nice and easy and groans when he sees the lieback. It was my intention to lead it – I have a very high “sloth-index”, meaning my arms are almost longer than my legs, and I have good biomechanics for pulling back on an edge while pushing my feet to the wall. But now his side of the rope is on top, so off he goes past the two pitons. He disappears around the corner. “Aw no, offwidth!” he shouts. Oh no indeed.

The offwidth turns out to be pretty reasonable in approach shoes and we reach the top of the tower. There are little spherical clusters of polemonium (sky pilot) growing out of sandy dirt between cracks in the rocks. Later I will realize that the pervasive smell of urine on LPP was not left by climbers but rather is the odor polemonium uses to attract its pollinators to such great elevations

Polemonium - or sky pilot

The ridge knife-edges towards the final tower, and we start simul-climbing, winding our way around turrets in the ridge. Depending on which aspect of the ridge we are standing, we can see Mt Whitney’s east face, the fishhook arête on Russel, or down into the Owen’s Valley. A screaming whistling sound fills the air, and we look up to see a glider circling. This is the second time we’ve seen one of these things in the Whitney Zone- the last time on the descent off of Mt. Russell.

Many times I think our passage forward is blocked, only to have GG magic some way through or around steep sections. We pass multiple rappel stations and a few bivy sites and we cluck at them disapprovingly. I would NOT want to sleep there. Nor would I like to start rappelling from up here. We only have the single rack of nuts, and then we’d have to start rapping off of our shoestrings.

After a while, I start leading, and after an unfortunate detour into some loose blocks, I pop out onto the massive summit plateau of LPP. We still have light left- a lot of it – so we share our smashed pastrami sandwich from the bottom of my pack and read the summit register. We’ve somewhat narrowly missed Steph Abegg, which is too bad because I’m a huge fan of her blog, but there was no chance we’d keep up with her, since she soloed the route. The entries are a mix of people who have come up from the northwest slopes (our descent route) and people who have climbed the ridge. The entries for the ridge-folk are binary. Either they’ve had a mild experience like us, or their entry reads something like this: “F-this f-ing ridge to hell! 36 hours on route.”

Expansive summit views

We still have the opportunity to screw ourselves on the descent, only this time I’ve thought ahead and used a GPS app on my phone to place a pin in the correct descent gully. Sure enough, we find prominent tracks leading down to a sandy chute that is not the one marked on my map. We think this is the false descent that ends in cliff bands 1000 ft below. We continue on to find the correct line and descend without incident.

Back in the forest, we encounter some old-growth trees. I give one a hug, prompting GG to exclaim, “enough with the flowers and trees!” because he wants to get down to the frosty chalet before it closes. We hustle and make it down in time to share a diabetes-bomb that is rootbeer blended with soft-serve ice cream.