On Aug. 9th, 2003  I completed my fifth ascent of Mount Whitney.  All five trips were different.  The first, in 1975, was the standard way, climbing from Whitney Portal at 8300' and camping at Trail Camp at 12,000' for the night. The next morning we hiked up the to the summit at 14,457.76' and took in the view for awhile.  Then we hiked the 11 miles  back down and drove home that day.  The second time, Lona and our group stopped at Outpost Camp at 10,300' to spend the night, hiked up to Trail Camp the next morning and slept until 10:30 PM.  Then we hiked all night by full moon to be at the top to see the sunrise. When we had our fill of that, we went all the way down and drove home.   That was a wonderful experience.  The sunrise on top was glorious.   I know many are saying, "That is a long time to take from Trail Camp."  OK, we had a slow group.  The third time, on a Fourth of July, Lona and I started up from Outpost Camp at sunrise and hiked the rest of the way to the top with crampons and ice axes on a trail still covered with  snow, arriving the summit a couple of hours before sunset.  We eked our way down the whole moonless night on the crunchy snow, clear back down to Outpost camp where we arrived at sunrise the next day. That was less wonderful.  My fourth assent was up the Mountaineering trail pioneered by John Muir.  That involved some crampon and ice axe work up a steep snowfield and then some scrambling up a boulder field.  That was also wonderful except for having to hobble down almost all of the mountain on a painfully swollen ankle I had sprained near the top coming down.

When we awoke (or in my case, got up) at 12:30 AM,  I stumbled out and found that a bear had gotten into my tent mate's day pack and had eaten his food.  I wondered why he had not left it in the bear box.  Then we found that the bear box was open, and the bear had taken my day's rations as well.  In a rare feat of tracking by flashlight, I found about 50 yards away the remains where the bear had eaten my food.  It was obvious from the debris that it was indeed a bear.  After the six of us discussed what we knew of the incident, such as hearing voices in the night which sounded like it came from near our camp, and one of us seeing a couple of them wandering in the road outside our camp at the same general time, we decided the circumstantial evidence pointed to the rowdies running out of booze and some of them getting into our bear box to see if we had any.  Naturally they would not have locked it back up which would have made a noise when the latch engaged.  Fortunately my tent mate and I had a little more hiking food stashed in another bear box near the trail head and the others shared a portion of their food, so we did not go hungry.

The night hike was cool and little breezy, but quite pleasant.  I used a white LED headlight to hike at night.  It is light weight, and the batteries seem to last forever.  It is not intensely bright, which is good because it did not blind me to things outside the beam.  It gave plenty of light to see where I was going.  My headlight also has a high intensity incandescent bulb head if I really need it to be brighter for such things as doing watch repair after dark, or perhaps more urgently, trying to unclog the fuel jet of the camp stove so supper can be cooked.

Eventually, the darkness of night gave way to the dim pre-dawn twilight.  We continued hiking without our headlights and in a stroke of good fortune we reached Trail Camp at 12,000’ well above the tree line just as the sun broke over the horizon.  It was an incredible, almost startling sight -- as if someone suddenly switched on a reddish orange floodlight to illuminate the eastern cliffs of the mountain range.  Had we been any later, we would not have been in position to see it.