Climbing Mt Whitney

On Labour Day weekend we took off in different directions - Sara spent her weekend with Aunty Viv and family in Camarillo (Janine came home from New York) and all the girls went pre-lim wedding shopping for Carly. Clark had to juggle his work schedule and was able to have Sunday off - and was invited to go climb Mt Whitney with Carlindo. Here's some of the shots of that trip...
Driving 70miles on the SR-395 from the I-15 interchange from Loma Linda Clark came across this little "dorpie" - Johannesburg!!! Population 165! Had the sign in the background read "Really good fresh BILTONG - 75miles", he would have been thoroughly convinced that this was indeed South Africa and not Southern CA!!!
Saturday night campsite...It was a great 2 nights of camping at the foothills of the eastern Sierra's. This is the night before the great climb.
Carlindo and Clark got up at 4am to meet up with the rest of the group and were supposed to start hiking up the mountaineers trail at 4:45am...but the rest of the group were late and we only started hiking at 5:45am - and here is sunrise about 10 minutes into our climb.

No - that tall peak on the right is not Mt Whitney - it is in fact more towards the right and even higher- this was at about 11 000 feet elevation (roughly 3300 metres above sea level) and the air was starting to get thin! The sky at this stage of the climb was already incredibly blue! Can you spot the moon just above the right peak???
This was taken at about 10 000 feet - saying goodbye to all the natural foliage - from here and to the top there was no greenery! Just rocks - a completely desolate and rocky world!!!

The last 1500 feet of the climb was a real killer! Here Carlindo and Jeff look to scale the last 600 feet of the climb - quite a steep gradient (at some spots definitely close to 60degrees!!!). We were really huffing and puffing at this stage - 5-steps-take-a-breather, 5-more-steps-take-a-breather! Luckily none of us struggled with altitude-sickness...

This is not trick photography! Here you can get a closer view of the actual steep climb - I scrambled ahead to get this photo of Carlindo (left) and Jeff (right) - one false slip and you can slide quite a few feet!!! Lots of loose sand and rocks here made the climb very difficult - took about 1 hour just to scale the last 600 feet.

At the top - Carlindo, Jeff and Clark finally manage a smile :) It was a great sense of accomplishment to scale this mountain and by tackling the mountaineers trail!
Well here is the sign on the summit of Mt Whitney - 14 500 feet is about 4400 metres. We didn't stay too long on the summit since the storm clouds were coming in from the west and we already could hear thunder rumbling in the distance...