ice axes, passes and climbing whitney

i think when i got my ice axe i thought it was pretty hilarious, like a hard core prop, that i didn't really know how to use... then it came to be a handy tool (initially for digging dump-holes, and then for traversing mountains), but then, while climbing whitney from the east and ascending mather pass, it became an essential piece of gear, critical for ascending and traversing steep snow sections...
this is a shot of jamz' ice axe i think (same as mine), on forester. it's so cold that's an icicle forming...


mather pass was my favourite because it involved some great rock climbing (we went too high and so had to down climb through crazy talus), and then a sketchy traverse ending in punching through the cornice to climb over onto the pass... so fun...
the second shot is a failed attempt to show how steep mather is - i'm above the pass, looking down on drop dead who is still traversing...

we started climbing whitney from the western side, however we'd had a pretty mixed up day previously. we were hiking with some friends who hadn't done the previous 700miles, nor been at altitude as much as we had, and the day - which was 40km of walking ended up being far too long... i thought it was incredibly fun because we came down a ridge in the moonlight (beautiful) and at one stage the snowy ridge we were descending just dropped away steeply, and i watched my friends disappear over the edge... i spent a lot of time laughing down that crazy sliding-postholing descent of insanity, whereas they spent a lot of time cursing (the snow; the night; and, i suspect, me, for laughing)... it was also great watching them ahead through the trees with their head-torches making moving circles of light on the snow...



anyway, we got into camp around 10:30 that night - i ate dinner at real midnight (not hiker midnight which is reportedly 9pm), and had no idea where one of our non-acclimated friends were. consequently our start the following day, after finding our friend, was a little tardy.

we realised mid-way up whitney we probably didn't have enough time to make the summit and return safely, so we sat on some rocks above guitar lake and shared the wine we'd been carrying for the top with some friends who'd summitted before dawn and were on their way back down... this i suspect was important altitude training. we spent the rest of the day glissading and boot-skiing back down the mountain like crazy folk, and then casually pottering around a beautiful lake/flooded meadow amongst epic snow clad mountains - definitely my favourite failed-summit experience...




the upshot of all this is that we continued walking, then when we hitched out of kearsage pass trailhead, we spent a day zeroing in lone pine (i was crook so my friends kindly switched whitney climbing days to give me a day to recover), and then climbed whitney from the eastern side, adding 2000 feet of climbing... i think we started at 8000 roughly and climbed to 14496 (kosciuszko is 7310 feet)... one section of whitney involved climbing 2500 vertical feet up a snow chute, hauling ourselves up step by step in the thinning air with an ice axe...

i saw a thing on tv last night here in mammoth on lincoln hall on everest, and it really puts whitney in perspective, still, it felt pretty epic going up...



there were a number of bold marmots and chipmunks on the summit of whitney...










(all the shots after the first 2 are from climbing whitney...)