Climbing Mt Whitney |
 On Saturday, 21 July 2012, an extremely successful trip came to an end. Eric and I had never before attempted to climb four peaks during one expedition – we once climbed three peaks on one trip (in early 2010 we climbed the highpoints in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, and Victoria in the space of just four days) – so we were thrilled to have scaled four US highpoints, each of which is higher than New Zealand’s Mt Cook, during a two-and-a-half week, two-thousand mile road trip. I must also admit that Eric was right. I’d initially suggested that as we were both going to Europe, we should fly to Los Angeles and work our way east. Eric persuaded me to reverse the idea, so we started in Albuquerque and headed west, but by doing so we climbed the four highpoints in increasing order of difficulty: we started with Wheeler Peak, New Mexico (top left), a six-hour round trip; we then climbed Humphreys Peak, Arizona (top right) in six-and-three-quarter hours; our third highpoint on the trip was Boundary Peak, Nevada (bottom left), which took us eight-and-a-quarter hours; and our trip ended with our fourteen-hour marathon on Mt Whitney (bottom right), the highest mountain in California and, indeed, the highpoint of the 48 contiguous states of the USA. |