At the end of September before the first storm of the season would probably prevent any further attempts, I decided to try to conquer one last 14er for the year:

White Mountain Peak near Bishop

It’s been on my list of mountains to climb for a while now, but the 4WD road to get to the trail head would probably have destroyed my old Mustang. But now that I have a Jeep, I should be able to handle it.

It’s a long drive from Bishop (54 miles or so with the last 17 miles being the aforementioned high clearance 4WD road) and I was racing the sun to get to the trail head before the sun set. The road wasn’t that bad, at first. But in the end, the road won.

About 3 miles from where the public road ends at Barcroft Gate, I got a flat tire. I don’t even remember going over anything that bad before my tire pressure warning started to indicate my front passenger tire was losing air. I saw an area to pull over and took a look. Swearing up a storm, I paused only to take pictures of the light from the setting sun. Priorities, right? 🙂 Fortunately, I had a full sized spare and managed to change the flat tire in only an half hour.

Which left me in the dark. Aborting back to Bishop wasn’t an option that late. I could put up my tent (or sleep in my Jeep) where I was or use my fog lights to hopefully make my way to the trail head. I decided three miles was worth the risk of driving in the dark and the chances of a second flat was very remote (although it had happened to me once in my old Wrangler).

Taking it very slow, I managed to make it to the trail head without any further problems. About 8-9 cars/trucks were already there, and few more came up after me. There was a strong wind blowing, so I decided that sleeping in the back of my Cherokee would be the best option. If I could have gotten to the area sooner and been able to see the full area, I could have put my camp in a little gully behind the road that was sheltered from the wind.

After shifting my gear around a bit, I lay down for the night. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up getting a lot of sleep that night. I did get some nice pictures of the Milky Way, though. As dawn approached, I also managed to get some nice sunrise pictures and a couple or time lapse movies.

With just a quick breakfast of re-hydrated blueberry granola and a donut to nibble on along the trail, I set off towards the peak. The trail was actually a road to the Barcroft station (an observatory and weather station), so was a pretty easy hike. Making my way past the station and then the telescope dome, the summit of White Mountain Peak came into sight.

Then about 2 miles from the summit with 1200 feet left to climb, my body started to fall apart. Since this hike was put together very fast based on trying to get it in before bad weather moved in, I didn’t have much time for acclimatization. In addition to the prior night’s problems sleeping at the trail head, I had a very bad night sleeping two nights before that. I was feeling so bad from that, I had pretty much given up on the idea of this hike Friday. Then I had to go and get a great nights sleep and made a snap decision to go for it early Saturday morning and made the long drive to Bishop and to the trail head. While I made it over five miles, the trial got much steeper for the last two miles.

So it probably was a combination of things, but even after a rest I just couldn’t continue. Slowly I made my way back to my Jeep and carefully drove back home, being very careful along the 4WD road.

In the end, I wished I had tried to do this hike on the way back from Colorado, but didn’t feel like the detour at the time. And after aborting this hike, I felt sick to varying degrees for the following week. So either I had a bug to start that caused the sleeping problems or the rushed acclimatization caused me to feel sick for days afterwards.

I will try again, but with a little more preparation time.

Even with the failure, I did enjoy the sights I saw along the way. I’ll just have to use them as motivation to complete the full climb next year.

Hopefully without having to replace another tire on my Jeep (whatever I hit slashed a pretty large gap along the threads, so it wasn’t repairable).

The photo highlights and movies of the sunrise:

All the rest of the photos I took: