Tina loaded to the max at Horseshoe Meadows - ready to head up and out (Monday evening).
--------
Tina headed back out late Monday afternoon more or less as planned. Earlier in the day she tried for hours to pack 10 days of food into her pack along with all her winter clothes, ice axe, crampons, bear canister, and so on but it was a no go. She had to change her target and load up for a much sooner exit at Kearsarge Pass.
Already, though, this has turned out to be a very good thing -- it's apparent now 10 days food would have never been enough to make the distance. It's definitely tough going up there especially with the water crossings. Yesterday Tina was nearly swept away trying to cross Rock Creek (which is a "raging torrent" by several accounts) but was able to retreat and eventually found a log that she could scoot over to reach the other side. Tina is usually happy to walk the narrowest of beams but she said she couldn't do it on this one -- the raging water made her dizzy.
Originally she'd hoped to make it past a 3-ish mile snow field yesterday and camp at Crabtree Meadows and perhaps summit Mount Whitney today. However, the troubles with crossing that creek took that option off the table and so she camped just a mile from the snow at ~10,400 feet.
That's just as well, tho. A storm has arrived north of us which is actually dumping 6-8 inches of snow on the mountains (north of us) and is resulting in high winds (38-43, gusts to 60) and low temperatures (a high of 35 forecast today) with a chance of T-storms near where Tina is at.
Consequently, she's about to cross the snow field and head towards a back country ranger station where she can hunker down for the day and camp tonight. She'll attempt Mount Whitney tomorrow instead of today and will probably exit east down towards Lone Pine for some regrouping instead of returning to the trail right away. As advised but is now very clear, you really need to have a team to cross some of these "streams" this year and some of the streams just aren't fordable without at least waiting until the next morning -- which makes for very slow going.
/David