Altitude affects everyone differently and after that experience, I am thinking it is safe to say I shouldn’t bring Brian on an Everest Base Camp trek. He is a super fit guy, but he needed to stop and rest every 20 mins or so. It all came together for me when I saw how much Brian was STRUGGLING on this hike. Then I saw a guy running around the parking lot with a heart rate monitor reveling at how much higher his pulse was at the same effort he had given at a lower elevation. I thought nothing of them since we weren’t in the Himalayas or some other mountain range with major elevation. There are signs at the trailhead about acclimating to the elevation before starting the Mount Whitney hike. Since I planned this trip last second I didn’t have a permit, but luckily you don’t need a permit to reach Lone Pine Lake on the Whitney Trail! I chose that as our hike for the day since it didn’t require a long drive from our campsite (and it was also a manageable distance for Brian at 5.5 miles round trip) If you hope to summit Whitney you will need a permit, which requires entering a lottery.
#ALABAMA HILLS FULL#
Being a narcissistic Washington dweller I always assumed Mount Rainier was tallest, but nope, Whitney stands a full 84 feet taller (and there are a few peaks in Colorado that are also taller than Rainier for any fellow narcissistic Washington dwellers) If you drive down the Whitney Portal Road out of Lone Pine you will reach the Whitney Portal campground and the Mount Whitney Trailhead. Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States. We slept until around 10 am and then began our drive to Lone Pine, California. I was super excited to get going, but also wanted Brian to have a good time on this trip so I allowed it. We had a 5am flight and landed around 7:15am in LA, we picked up our rental car and Brian immediately asked me if we could stop at his friend’s house to take a nap. I forget that not everyone gets excited about driving 3.5 hours to the middle of nowhere with me. I have a horrible habit of picking the earliest possible flight to save money and pack as much as possible into the day. Day One: Fly into LAX, Drive to Alabama Hills
#ALABAMA HILLS FREE#
He wasn’t the happiest camper (haha see what I did there), but a free place to sleep, and the fact that it was my birthday kept him from complaining too much about the situation. With our destination chosen, I informed my nature-hating boyfriend of my plan.
There are some rules in place surrounding this so double check the BLM site before planning your trip! Now Alabama Hills is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which means there is free dispersed camping.
#ALABAMA HILLS MOVIE#
While you may not know about Alabama Hills by name, chances are you have seen this area in a TV show or movie at some point, as it’s an extremely popular Hollywood filming location! The road you drive down to reach the campsites is even called, “Movie Flat Road” Before white settlers and eventually Hollywood stumbled across this location the Paiute Tribe called this land home and you can even find pictographs in the rock formations. The view looked familiar and I realized, this is near Alabama Hills! I have wanted to camp at Alabama Hills for a while but somehow forgot while I was planning this trip that it was an option. California has a ton of great outdoor locations to visit and I was looking at various campsites you can reserve on the website when I came across the Lone Pine Campground. With my Joshua Tree plan foiled I decided we would still fly into LAX since flights there from Seattle were so cheap. Brian believes he is lucky, but I tend to take a more pragmatic approach. I am adventurous, but basing my entire camping trip around extremely popular first-come-first-serve campgrounds is a little TOO adventurous for me. Great idea in theory but all the reservable campsites had been spoken for already. At first, I thought of flying into LAX and camping at Joshua Tree National Park. I think planning that alone was a little stressful for him so this year he told me to pick the destination for my birthday trip. You might remember last year that Brian surprised me with a trip to Banff for my birthday.