Day 19

July 21, 2012 Today’s lesson: Guidebooks lie. Today was supposed to be a fairly flat 8 mile short day to Guitar lake. The guide book print outs that I brought showed the elevation of several points along the way today. Each elevation was the same, give or take 1 or 2 hundred feet – which is NOTHING! Little did we know, between those points were much higher elevation gains. By the time we got to Timberline lake, I was tired, Jasin was tired, and our maps said Guitar lake was only 1.3 miles away. LIES! The climb to guitar lake was so frustrating, each time we made it over a ridge, there was no lake. Just another ridge, and then another ridge. Mentally, this causes me to start to breakdown. It as if someone picked up the lake, and moved it just out of my sight. We finally reached Guitar Lake at 2:30 pm. Apparently, 20 other people reached it before we did. This place is like the base camp at Mt. Everest. Tent city! And by the time we had dinner, twenty more tents were set up. Everyone is preparing to summit Whitney tomorrow morning. Whitney looms over us, a staggering 3,000 feet above our tents. At 14,450 feet she is the tallest point in the continental United States. We have caught up with those damn boy scouts, but so far, I don’t see anyone else we know. We have an extra dinner because we made such good time hiking from Muir Trail Ranch, so we each got a whole dinner to ourselves. I took the smaller beef teriyaki while Jasin took the massive Spanish rice, red peppers, and ground beef. Guitar Lake is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. The small lake surrounded on all sides by massive peaks and cliffs. The weather here has been very unpredictable. When we arrived it was cloudless and sunny, but by 3:30 it was dark, windy, drizzling, then hailing on us. It cleared up again within 45 minutes. If it was hailing down here, imagine what it was doing on Whitney. I must confess, I am really nervous about summiting Whitney. Its about 5 miles to the top from our camp, And then 10 miles to the bottom. We won’t be going all the way down tomorrow, because it’s miserably steep (from what we have heard). I have heard the hardest day of the whole trip is the descent from Whitney. I am also nervous about the 3,000 ft we have to climb and the weather, as it is always changing. It is dangerous up there. We should have cell phone reception at some point as we are going down Whitney as we are sure our parents are panicking by now. We plan to spend the rest of the evening resting and hydrating in preparation for the summit tomorrow. Going to be a big day! We have been walking for 19 days to get to this point, it is surreal that we are here now. Love, In Whitney’s Shadow