I had been getting nervous about this roughly 22 mile hike for awhile... I don't think I will ever be in as good of shape as I was before having kids, but I was looking forward to accomplishing this feat and feeling proud of a physical challenge... and it was a challenge! Mt. Whitney is 14,494' tall and is the tallest summit in the contiguous United States.
We camped out at Lone Pine Campground for a couple hours at the base of Mt. Whitney before waking up at 2 a.m. to be on the trail by 3 a.m. It is a good thing it was dark out when we started hiking because if I had seen what I was climbing it would have been even harder. The first six miles up when by pretty quickly since we were fresh off the start and hadn't reached too much altitude. Even the 99 switchbacks before the last two miles weren't too terrible, although far from easy. The last two miles just about killed me.
I saw the sign that said 1.9 miles to the summit and thought... 'Maybe I am in better shape than I realized--only 2 miles left!' Then the difficulty of hiking at an altitude of over 13,000' for two miles really sunk in. The last two miles took about two hours! It didn't help that I got altitude sickness, but at least we made it to the top. Teddy ran up the last 400m or so, but was about ready to pass out...
The view from the top was incredible. We also met a new friend... a fat marmot was great at making people's bag a little bit lighter for the way down. We lost a granola bar to the thief!
As hard as it was getting up the mountain, the way down was much worse. I didn't want to think about going down on the way up... but what goes up, must come down. It took us 8 hours to get to the top, we hung out at the top for about 1 hour, and it took 6.5 hours to get down. My knees have never been so sore in my entire life!
The mountain kept playing tricks on us... we saw the parking lot at the bottom and said only fifteen minutes left! Two hours later we said the same thing... and about 30 minutes after that we made it out.
I will post more pictures after we get them from everyone in the group.
Marie got a 'dirt' cake for her birthday with oreos, cool whip, pudding, and gummy worms!
It took Marie some practice, but then she was using these party blowers like crazy! Claire was entertained by them, so Marie just loved to blow them at her.
Marie loves her wagon. She can even pull Claire around!
Marie got quite the stash. She got the wagon and boots that were in previous pictures and all this stuff here: pez, bucket & shovel, white board, water bottle, work gloves. She is so spoiled!
