Day hiking permits for Mt Whitney

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 stupid 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 have a good 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 friday before, and make sure to arrive before 4pm).

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.
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). Repeat: the mountaineering trail does not require a permit for day hikes (Yes, pundits, it does enter the Whitney Zone, but a day hike to the top of Whitney along this route does not require a permit, as of 2002).

What happens if you did pay for and get 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.

Is there a way to get a permit number without actually showing up in person? Yes. Call the rangers and tell them to leave your permit in the night box. The ranger will tell you where you can pick up your permit after hours AND read you your permit number on the phone. This is the only way to get a ranger to read you your permit number (the permit that you purchased) over the phone. But of course your money is helping them improve their bureaucracy, so in 2006 the permit-permitting letter said that they are discontinuing the "night box". Not sure if this trick will still work after 2006.

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.

If you take the regular trail, there are usually rangers posted right after the Lone Pine lake just to check permits (yes, paid with your tax dollars). I had reports of people meeting three rangers who were just checking permits (yes, all of them paid with your taxdollars). I believe there is no military base in America where you have to go through three checkpoints.

This is a typical form of bureaucracy that supports itself: both the fees and the fines are needed in order to be able to pay 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).

The $15 they ask you to pay for Mt Whitney equals the entrance tickets to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Louvre in Paris combined. Those are museums with hundreds of billions of dollars of art and that cost millions a day to maintain. And imagine if, in order to visit the Louvre, you had to go through a lottery and a reservation system and pick up the tickets the day before etc...

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