2002 Mt. Whitney Trip Day 3
(Saturday, 10 August, 2002)

We had noticed that Alabama Hills was on the Whitney Portal road, so we decided to check it out. Apparently it was extensively used as a setting for early Hollywood western movies, since its relatively close to Hollywood, and it looks very south-western. There are tons of odd rock formations there, and we spent a couple of hours off-roading and checking them out. Its very easy to imagine cowboys and indians hiding behind the formations in ambush. To our surprise, the formations are granite, not sandstone, as we'd previously thought. It was a lovely area, with great vistas of Lone Pine Peak and Mt. Whitney.

After getting my Subie filthy at Alabama Hills, we drove up to Horseshoe Meadows at almost 10,000ft. On the way we had great views of what's left of Owens Lake (which isn't much, since Los Angeles siphoned most of the water from its tributaries (see the movie Chinatown for a great fictionalized account of this)). We spent several hours walking around the meadow, which was very scenic, taking pictures of flowers and butterflies. We figured it'd be good to do something very low-key but at a high altitude, and this fit the bill nicely. There are several other trailheads here, some of which go to Mt. Whitney as well (but are very long and require a multi-day backpacking trip). I'd like to hike here more someday - its very pretty, and much less-travelled than the main Whitney trails.

On the way back, we took a side trip on Granite View Rd., another un-paved road that dead-ended at the base of the Sierras next to a stream. It wasn't terribly interesting unfortunately. My car started to overheat from all of the off-roading and the high temperatures (OK, the fact that I had the aircon on probably didn't help matters!), so we decided that was enough offroading for the day.

We called Piero's messaging service to see what time we were all meeting for dinner in Lone Pine. 6:00 at the Pizza Factory in Lone Pine, it turned out. We had several hours until then, so we walked around Lone Pine, buying a third batch of last-minute gear, then headed up to Whitney Portal, as it was much cooler there (it was in the 90s in Lone Pine). We hung around at the Portal, walking up to a nice little waterfall formed by Lone Pine Creek, then on our way out, we ran into Piero, showing some of the group where the trailhead is. Apparently all of them had a "campsite" at the overflow camping area at the portal. We took a group picture, then went to chow on pizza. Coincidentally, Matthieu and his friend Suzy were camped right across the road from us at Lone Pine campground. Suzy also wanted to start the hike early, so we agreed to meet at our site and drive to the trailhead together on Sunday EARLY morning.

After pizza, we packed up camp as much as we could to safe on early-morning effort, and went to bed at around 9:30. I slept horribly due to anticipation of the hardest hike I've ever done at the highest elevation I've ever been at. I got maybe 90min of sleep, if that.

• Day 1 - Drive to Auburn
• Day 2 - Drive to Whitney Portal, hike to Lone Pine Lake
• Day 3 - Alabama Hills, Horseshoe Meadows, Whitney Portal
• Day 4 - Mt. Whitney dayhike!
• Day 5 - Drive home - Manzanar, Devil's Postpile, Mono Lake, Bodie