Mt. Whitney from David Frandsen on Vimeo.

For the past few years, Mt. Whitney has been a personal challenge for Brett Faulknor and myself. He’d been turned back twice and I’d had to turn around once because of mountain sickness, and a general lack of readiness. We were calling this the Mt. Whitney revenge tour.

This time around, with the proper gear, Faulknor, TT writer David Skinner, video man David Frandsen and I hopped in a brand new Lexus on loan from Toyota, to make another push up the mountain. We made it through a 1am summit push, a 14-hour hiking day at elevation, and the 99 Switchbacks that turned into 100-plus switchbacks to get to the summit and back down in two days. Then, since why not, I drove us 9 hours back to Redding on 20 minutes of sleep (and a flat tire, but I’ll save that for the Lexus review). I could say that I wasn’t hallucinating during the drive, but that’d be a baldfaced lie.

 Skinner (left) and I layering up at midnight before we headed up to the summit.

I’m finding that more often than not, the best part of these trips happens in my head. The highlight of this one was the 8 hours of self-doubt that I had to push through. At Trail Camp (12k feet), we hit our sleeping bags at 4pm to hit our 1am summit time. I was awake until about 11:40pm thinking about all the reasons we shouldn’t try for the summit, and I had the same argument for all of them.

It’ll be too exposed and icy. You haven’t had enough sleep.You got altitude sickness last time. The weather’s getting sketchy. Going back would be the responsible thing.

Every time this happens, I have the same thought: If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it.

So when the alarm went off at midnight, I got up, layered up, and hiked up. And I did something that I thought I couldn’t. And damn, it was sweet. I firmly believe that climbing a mental mountain is as satisfying as climbing a physical one.

By the way, If it was easy…really works. I said the same thing when I thought I’d have to quit the ultra run a few weeks later. Try it the next time you think about quitting something.

It was a great trip with the guys, and it was excellent to knock that sucker off my bucket list. It felt pretty epic until we saw those ultrarunners armed only with waterbottles running up while we were hiking down. I guess that’ll be next year’s challenge.

First glimpse of the sun. The promise of warmth was as welcome as the view.

Special thanks to the guys for testing out boots for some of my articles, and especially to Toyota for lending us a Lexus RX570 for the road trip. That thing was CUSH. Review pending.

Tallest person in the lower 48 for a few minutes: standing on the summit of Mt. Whitney