"Dreams are free, motherfucker," a.k.a. California dreaming

I always thought that "Dreams Are Free, Motherfucker!" was the best song title ever. (Too bad it's not actually a very good song, at least not by Minutemen standards). Let the dreaming begin.

See, it seems that, every few years, I get the bright idea to hike up (and down) Mount Whitney in one day. 22 miles, 6200 or so feet of vertical rise (from about 8300' to almost 15000'. Tallest mountain in the lower 48 states). I did it for the first time in 2003 with a friend. It was great going up (11 miles) and just awful going down. Fatigue sets in and everything sucks on the downhill. For me, the dirty secret of mountain hiking is that the downhill is the hard part. I swore I would never do Whitney again.

But in 2009, my son Kevin was 18 and really wanted to do it. So did my buddy Will, at age 59, mind you. So we entered the lottery -- yup, the damn hike is so popular, there is a lottery for permits to hike it in order to keep the traffic down. 100 day-hike permits per day. You have 24 hours, starting at midnight on the day of your hike. Rain or shine, and, oh yeah, thunderstorms come in the afternoon. You don't want to be on the tallest object in the contiguous U.S. during a thunderstorm. So you start early (with headlamps on) in order to end early.

We didn't get permits through the lottery, but somehow we scored them just before we flew out. We spent five days doing warmup acclimatization hikes around the area and then, on hike/permit day, left Mammoth Lakes, CA, where we were staying, at about midnight, started hiking about 2:30 a.m. and finished that afternoon. It went like this (except this very rough video barely shows any of the action. The wind was blowing wildly from about halfway up onwards, hence the crappy sound; I quit filming after we summitted because I was beat to hell;  oh, yeah, check out what I had for "breakfast" in the pre-paleo days... hahahaha) :







Anyway, Kevin and I made the summit; Will missed by about a mile. He ran out of gas. The downhill was miserable. I was exhausted, fell a couple times, cracked some ribs. All worth it, mind you, but still....

We swore we would never do it again (again).

Except this year, now my son Sean is 18 and he wants to do it. So I'm in, Kevin's in, Sean's in, and dammit if Willie, at age 62, isn't in too for another crack at that magnificent bastard of a mountain.

Except we lost the permit lottery (again).

So, I am hoping we get lucky (again). Otherwise we have just booked two weeks in mid-August in  Mammoth Lakes for hiking every *other* peak we can get our boots on -- hardly a bad consolation prize since the Sierra Nevada really are my favorite mountains in the U.S. And three of us, not Willie, are hoping all our CrossFitting and paleo eating has made us stronger, tougher, etc for this year's attempt.

And all of that is why I am California dreaming today. For free. Motherfucker.