Day hiking permits for Mt Whitney

Update of 2009: There are now rangers checking permits on the North Fork/ Mountaneering route. They have vastly improved that route, but the catch is that now everybody walks the same way and it's therefore easier for rangers to check everyone's permit. They improved the route not to serve the public but to harass the public. The rangers also demolished all the little stone refuges that generations of hikers had built and maintained at the Upper Boyscout Lake, and which represented the ethics of mountaineering at its best. But the rangers do not practice mountaineering: just blatant banditry.

Update of 2008: The fascists of Inyo National Forest who run the Mt Whitney system have now extended their demented lottery system to the whole mountain, regardless which way you climb it, and even to nearby mountains. You now need a (very hard to get) Whitney permit in order to hike (the very seldom visited) Mt Russell, Carillon and any peak and pass nearby. Please boycott any initiative to increase the funding for the national forest. The more money they get, the more bureaucrats they can hire, the more restrictions they will apply and enforce. Hiking Mt Whitney has become an incredible bureaucratic nightmare. Ask your Congress representative and senator to boycott all funding for the Inyo National Forest. Only if these bureaucrats are fired will we get our mountains back.

Hiking Mt Whitney is not easy. It is not the mountain, it's the bureaucracy that makes it so difficult. You do need a permit to hike up Whitney in the summer. If you don't have a permit, rangers will cite you and turn you back. The regulations are so complicated that rangers themselves disagree on their interpretations.

To hike the regular Mt Whitney trail in one day requires a day-hike permit. This is not only a very unfair practice, which rewards people who've got nothing to do over people who have a job and can't plan ahead, but over the last few years they have also made it as difficult as possible for us to get one. The phone number changes all the time and it's busy all the time, and the website has the least intuitive name one could think of, and finding the permit area requires a degree in dealing with retarded minds, and the permit system is matched only by horror tales of the old Soviet Union.

That said, permits for summer day hikes can in theory be obtained from Inyo National Forest (1-760-873-2408). Lone Pine ranger station 760 876-6200. They also have a reservation number: 760 873-2483, but only in the afternoon. Permits cost $15 (or, permits are free, but the reservation system costs $15... bureaucrats can afford to have a twisted sense of humour).

These permits become available sometime at the beginning of the year (usually february) and are first assigned via a lottery (no, this is not a joke). Those that are still available after the lottery, are sold via the reservation system or are available for free at the ranger station. Confused? The rangers are too: ask them how it works and you will get several different answers.

The rules change every year, so don't trust anything on this page.

To prove that there is no limit to human stupidity, the lottery system has been further complicated. This time the winners of the lottery don't get a permit: they only get a letter that they are entitled to a permit (a permit-permitting letter, if you wish). To get the actual permit, one must show up in person the day before the hike at the ranger station in Lone Pine. If you applied to hike on a saturday, you have to take a day off and drive all the way to Lone Pine on the day before, and make sure to arrive before 4pm. You can request that the rangers leave your permit in a "night box" located at the visitor center, but permits have been "stolen" or have been missing. So make sure to call them and get your actual permit number (not just the reservation number that is printed on the letter). If they forget to put your permit in the "night box" or if someone else takes it, you can still produce the permit number. (While i am not encouraging anyone to steal these permits, it is obviously very easy to do so: as long as you obtained one legal permit, you will be given the password to open the night box, and then you can take all the permits that you like; hence you can count on someone stealing yours).

To maximize chances of obtaining a permit for the desired day, it has become commonplace to ask two or three friends to apply for the same day that you want. (In theory permits are non-transferrable, but you are not required to carry a photo id on the trail, so rangers have no way to check if you are really the person who bought that permit). If more than one person wins the lottery, i hear that the extra tickets can easily be sold on the Web.

In 2005, the ranger stations that issued permits were: Mt. Whitney Ranger Station (Lone Pine), White Mtn Ranger Station (Bishop), Mammoth Lakes Ranger Station, and the Scenic Area Visitor Center (north end of Lee Vining).

In 2004 we were able to change the "group leader" (i.e., the owner) of a permit just by calling the Lone Pine ranger station. So it was possible and easy to trade permits (despite the countless warnings that permits cannot be traded!).

Beware! In the past (before 2001), you would not be checked for permits if you started hiking very early in the morning and returned late afternoon: this is no longer true. The rangers have enough of our tax money to actually ambush hikers on the Whitney trail. In august 2009 i met three rangers checking permits, and it wasn't even a weekend.
Without a permit you can proceed only up to Lone Pine lake (about 1/5th of the way) or you can hike the North Fork (mountaineering) trail, which still does not require a permit (until another communist bureaucrat finds out). NOTE OF 2009: this is no longer true.

What happens if you did pay for and got a permit-permitting letter, but did not have time to go and pick up the actual permit? Big trouble, because the reservation number on the letter is not (of course...) the permit number. When you surrender your reservation number, the rangers give you a permit number (that they keep secret until you show up in person). Your "permit" is basically just a carrier for the permit number. The ranger who checks permits on the mountain will want to see that number (the permit number) and doesn't know what to do with reservation numbers.

Of course, if you plan to stay overnight on the mountain, you always need a permit, regardless of the route you take, but it is slightly easier to get an overnight permit.

This is a typical form of bureaucracy that feeds itself: both the fees and the fines are needed in order to be able to pay for the rangers who enforce the rules.

(Note for naive readers. I doubt that these hiking permits limit damage to a delicate ecological environment: the most accessed and vulnerable areas have always been the ones that are still permit-free, and above that only a small percentage of tourists would go anyway, and there is very little to damage above 3500 meters. Half Dome in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon in Arizona are far more delicate and receive far more tourists. If indeed hiking at high altitude hurts the environment, then the poor Alps, a lot more trafficked than Whitney and for a few more thousand years, including a few hundred armies, would already be reduced to a desert. Furthermore, the quota system is simply sending a lot more hikers to the mountaineering route, which is a far more delicate ecosystem. These hiking permits are just bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake).

to complain about this stupid system and demand the deportation to North Korea of the human (?) being who came up with the lottery system.

Of course, Whitney gets more visitors than other mountains. It is, after all, the only major mountain with a trail all the way to the top. However, the permit system has simply increased its popularity and there are now many more people who desire hiking it (most of them totally unprepared). So the permit system has encouraged people to hike Whitney instead of discouraging them.

At the same time that the permit system was introduced in order to protect the "delicate ecosystem" of Mt Whitney, the mountaineering route (once a legendary route that very few people had actually attempted) was improved and keep being improved. This is indeed a side of Whitney that is biologically rich (both wildlife and vegetation). Nonetheless, year after year the rangers have worked on creating a use trail that now (2010) extends all the way to the final chute. That has indeed hurt a "delicate ecosystem". In fact, the rangers have probably sped up by a few centuries the process of creating a use trail to the summit that would have spontaneously taken place as people hiked that side of the mountain.

I could name hundreds if not thousands of places that have a delicate ecosystem that is being wiped out by crowds of human beings, but most of them are located near cities, very far from the rarely visited high sierra (that, incidentally, gets most of its visitors in just one or two summer months).