Memories of Whitney 97 (The Mountaineers' Route)

by Mike Salomon

It started out innocently enough. I sitting there, at the San Diego Brewing Company, pounding down hard cider after another Wednesday evening of watching Patsy Hughes lead all the hard routes while everyone stood around silently unsure if they would even be able to TR them.

Bob Pinsker was sitting next to me, so I thought I would take this opportunity to get some info on the Mountaineers' route on Whitney. I had been invited on a trip leaving in 2 weeks led by Steve Riggs. It would be Steve's 2nd attempt at this route. Originally I declined, I had already summited Whitney once and my doctor told me that my injured back and knees would not survive any more long descents on steep trails and scree with a heavy pack ("stick to snow, it's a lot easier on the joints," he said).

Turns out that Bob has done the route more than once (as well as many others that are on my list). He assured me that it was nothing. An easy approach and then a short class 3 section. I don't know how much time Bob spends hauling around a heavy pack, but I would bet it's less then me. Ahh hell, if it's easy for Bob, it should be easy for me, even with the knees. Plus, it would give me a chance to get a close look at the routes on the East face, which I want to do next summer. After all, I wasn't doing anything better that week anyway.

I called my doctor to get some Diamox and Naproxen. Even easy routes at 14,000 ft require the proper equipment. I told him my plans and asked him to phone in the prescription and save me a visit. All I got was another lecture about how I just wasn't built for mountaineering (I weigh under 100 pounds, have 2 torn discs, bad knees, and a 1 inch leg length discrepancy) and he again advised me to take up swimming or golf.

By the next week, and after a few calls to my HMO, I had a new doctor. This one was much more accommodating and made a same day call to the Pharmacy. It all goes to show, if you make a stink, you can get what you need even under managed care!

Steve insisted that we travel light and fast, no packs over 40 pounds. I took my pack to his place to see how this could be done. He took out a postal scale and weighed everything, all the way down to my toothbrush. After shaving off a few ounces here and a few grams there, he got my standard pack (55 pounds) to slightly under 40. I have never done a peak with a pack so light, even when the going got steep, I could barely get a workout.

I met our group on Monday morning and we drove right out to Whitney Portal. The group looked quite strong. In addition to Steve and myself, there was a climber from LA, a caver/climber from the NSS, and an ex-army guy who just got back from 6 years in Germany (after having done a lot of snow and ice work in the Alps). In the morning we hauled our junk up to the lake at 11,350 ft and set up base there. With our ultra light weight packs things moved fast so it was still very early when we got there. We dug out the Schnapps and cigars and worked hard to kill the time (as well as a few brain cells). The plan was to finish Whitney the next day and do Mt. Russell the day after. This trip should be a snap, I thought, as I polished off the bottle.

The next morning we got up late and headed out to Iceberg lake at 12,600 ft. We downed some powerbars and moved up the base of the rock.

Bob had mentioned that the gully might be full of snow and ice, and advised me to stay up on the rocks to the right. It was. What he didn't mention was the rockfall. Big rocks, small rocks, and loose clots of snow came spinning by us as they barreled down the gully. We started to feel like nervous pins in a bowling alley.

I remembered Bob's advice and we moved to the right, up again the walls of the gully on the right. Now we were on loose third class rock, but it seemed safer then being in the bowling alley.

Our ascent on the loose rock quickly turned into a scary game of "Try Not to Kill your Fellow Climbers". Everytime I touched a rock to progress upwards, it would move slightly, leaving me to wonder if it would stay long enough to get over it or just slide out from under me and go shooting down towards the climber below me.

Each hand and foothold became a potential lethal weapon that I could unleash on my friends below me. About 1 out of 5 rocks seemed stable enough to use, but you never found out for sure until your weight was on it. More than once I remember swooping back down to grab a basketball size chunk of granite that I had dislodged and was sliding down. Everyone was yelling "Rock" so often that it became a meaningless phrase. At one point I heard Steve scream "Mike!!! Rock!!! I shoved my fingers into a crack on the wall next to me and pulled up till my toes were just off the ground. I heard that funny Doppler effects sound that small objects make a they fly right past you at high speeds. "Missed me", I yelled back with a smile.

We figured out a scheme of sending 2 people at a time up a section, while the others hid behind a ledge cowering from the rockfall that would result. The idea was that if 2 people were right behind one another, and the top climber dislodged a rock, it wouldn't have time to accelerate before it hit the climber behind them. Although it slowed us down to a snails pace, this system worked semi-well, at least until the storm started.

We were about half way up when I started to hear crackles in the sky and felt the chunks of hail as they broke on my helmet. Then the rain and wind came.

As the rain poured, the ground got wet and the talus we were inching up started to slide down in miniature land slides. By then we knew things were no longer safe. We all scrambled up to a ledge on the side and put on our Gore-Tex and debated about retreating.

No one liked the idea of going down. Not only because the summit was so close, but because going down the hellish shit we came up would have been suicidal. At this point we were a half hour past our turn around time. We decided to proceed to the notch just under the summit block by climbing out of the gully and traversing the walls on the side. The official justification was that we could get to the summit, maybe we could find a safer way down. After all, wasn't it Scott Fisher and Doug Hall that proved turn around times are a relative thing when your so close to the top!

Anyway, there's nothing like some class 3 & 4 climbing with cold hands on wet rocks in the middle of a storm. I had forgotten my Gore-Tex gloves shells at home, but picked up a pair of $1.50 yellow dish washing gloves at Lone Pine. These worked great. Not only waterproof, but the yellow latex is like having climbing shoe rubber on your hands! The climbing was technically easy, but we were constantly pausing to suck in the thin air and ponder the exposure.

We got to the notch with no incident. My altimeter showed that we were 500 ft below the summit. We had two options, go up a 4th class vertical section directly to the top, or traverse a steep snow slope to a 3rd class section that was rumored to be on the Northeast side. The snow slope was very slippery from all the rain and since we hadn't brought ice axes a small slip would mean a high speed slide into the rocks hundreds of feet below. We started on the 4th class section, but gave up when we got bathed in cold water as it cascaded down the wet rocks.

As we waited on the notch, hoping for a break in the storm, we saw two old French climbers making a rushed decent from the summit. They had been caught by the storm on the last few pitches of a route on the East face. They finished the climb and reported running across the summit with lightning bolting everywhere and their hair standing up from the electricity in the air. It was then that we decided to turn around.

They showed us a decent route that went down a series of ledges on the left side of the gully. Down climbing the wet rocks was non-ideal, but at least it was clean granite, free of mud and rockfall.

We all got down on the base of the East Buttress and back to camp just before night fell. The rain continued through much of the night. The next morning the sky was dry, but we could see storm clouds moving in from the East. It hit just as we had taken down the tents and loaded our packs. We headed down in the rain and hail until we dropped below 10,000 ft, when the sun came out and the sky cleared.

That's the last time I take advice from Bob Pinsker. If the Mountaineers' Route is his idea of easy, I would hate to see what his version of a moderate route is like.

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