Mount Whitney

A Little Fresh Air

Climbing Mount Whitney's Magnificent East Face

Just above the Fresh Air Traverse on Mt. Whitney's East Face (photo: K. Wedberg)

Vertical Dreams

MOUNT WHITNEY, CALIFORNIA — When I close my eyes I see granite. Gray-white blocks angle sharply beneath my feet, plunging downward past my rubber-tipped toes. I press my back against a wall of rock as if I could somehow dissolve myself into the mountain. Everything feels like it's moving—the rock, the ground, the air—all conspiring together, pushing me toward that incredible void...

Mount Whitney

Approaching the East Face

The Fresh Air Traverse

Exposure

Like most of my schemes, the Idea was born of a curious blend of desire and improbability.

Two friends and I had just climbed Mount Whitney for the first time via the challenging Mountaineer's Route.

As we sat breathless upon the summit, worrying about how we were going to get back down, two climbers suddenly materialized from the void to our east and scrambled up alongside us.

They came from the east.

That such a thing was even within the realm of the possible seemed to defy imagination.

Just to creep toward the edge of Whitney's east face and look down required courage—if not the will to court disaster.

Seen from the town of Lone Pine—the postcard view—Mount Whitney's east face appears as a grand and utterly sheer wall of granite, two thousand vertical feet high.

To climb a wall like that was in a league so far beyond my own realm of experience as to seem like a feat of magic.

At that time I did not in the least know anything about technical roped climbing.

In fact, our own ascent of the Class 3 Mountaineer's Route had well and truly terrified me. Whitney's north chute had seemed nearly vertical to me. At the same time, I was utterly captivated by the climbers' daring in tackling such a big, sheer wall of rock. What would it take, I wondered then, to accomplish the same feat myself—to climb Mount Whitney's east face?

That question lodged itself firmly in my imagination over the following years. And time itself was part of the answer: I undertook an apprenticeship of years spent hiking and scrambling in the Sierra, slowly gaining experience and confidence in high country terrain.

This to me is one of the great joys of climbing mountains: you can set any goal for yourself that you choose, and if that vertical dream proves too lofty, you can always find something a little lower, a little closer, a little shorter. Collect enough of those easier routes, however, and a funny thing tends to happen—sometimes those loftier goals come back into range.

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