Tahquitz, CA

Ok, so maybe we've only driven about 3,900 miles of the 200,000 on this trip, but the Goose is holding up great with only a couple of hiccups. By the way, that is a pretty average MPH for the trip. The wind really puts the brakes on this thing.

In a game time decision on Saturday morning, we went south to the San Jacinto mountains from Barstow instead of north to the Sierras. There is a rock of historical climbing importance there called Tahquitz that we would be missing out on if we skipped it. Some of the first technical climbing routes were set there from the 30's to the 60's, including, ironically, the birth of the current Yosemite Decimal System of rating route difficulty. The downside of this is that it is also ground zero for "old school" ratings, where for historical reasons the original ratings are kept even though they are horribly inaccurate. Nonetheless, we got to the town of Idyllwild just below the climbs on Saturday. It was a great little mountain town/tourist trap, and we listened to a cover band while we had a beer and some BBQ (they ran out of pork, which I think would be illegal in NC). We had a little more time to kill before bedtime (e.g. dark), so we found ourselves at a wine tasting for the afternoon, which was good practice for Sonoma where we will be in a couple of weeks. We got a bottle of wine to go, and drove up the mountain to the parking lot where we camped for the next 2 nights. While we did have a bottle opener, we did not have any glasses, so we poured the wine into our Nalgenes to sip on it.

We headed up to the base and got on a route called Northeast Face West. It was one of the earlier moderate routes put up on the mountain during the 50's. Like the others, it is grossly under rated by a couple of grades, following a deep but empty corner system up for 1200'. The climb was great fun, but a long one. After a couple of pitches, we notice that search and rescue pulled up in the parking lot below (which was visible from the wall), followed by a CHP helicopter which circled the rock and basically followed us up the route for about 4 hours. By the time we got back down around 7pm, they were gone. We read the next day on the county website that a hiker was injured and had to be airlifted out to the hospital. Strange that we never saw the helicopter actually carry anyone out. We just wanted to point out that it keeps being the hikers (and not the rock climbers) who need to get rescued.

We had breakfast at a fancy-pants little cafe in Idyllwild the next morning before heading to Lone Pine. We arrived in Lone Pine last night and camped in another rather historic place, the Alabama Hills just west of town in plain view of Mt Whitney. Lone Pine is known for both climbing and the setting of many western films. It was kind of cool to go to the local restaurant with tons of screenshots from the old westerns and see the exact same rock we parked next to on a poster for Jack Palance's "The Lonely Man".

There is still a significant amount of snow on the trail up to Mt Whitney, and it is unknown how much ice still remains on our original line up the east buttress, so we opted to drop the rock climbing and climb via the mountaineer's route, a snowy couloir which is still completely covered in snow (it is the little gully leading up to the right side of the higher peak in the middle of the shot below). Should be a good time, and the packs are a ton lighter than usual without the climbing gear, so that will be nice. 

So we're off to Whitney Portal, the trailhead for the climb. The plan is to hike about 2/3 of the way up to the snow line tomorrow, then summit and come back on Thursday. Wish us luck!