Mt. Whitney Training | Hike #1 | El Cajon Mountain

Earlier this year, my husband and I decided it’d be fun to attempt to hike Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states. We went through the lottery, were miraculously selected for our top choice date: June 22nd, and thus began the training. Spoiler alert: we went through months of training only to come to the point of not being able to hike Mt. Whitney since it was closed due to a fire the day we had our permit to hike. :( Definitely a disappointment, but the training was certainly still memorable!

So although I couldn’t hike Mt. Whitney, I still wanted to document the hikes we did. It was a fun time for us (well, fun except for the drives through LA traffic) and I’m certain that we were well prepared to summit, so if anything I hope these help future Mt. Whitney hikers! And hopefully next year we’ll be prepping for this again… :)

Our weekend training hikes looked like this:

El Cajon Mountain
Mt. Baden Powell
Mt. Baldy via Devils Backbone
Mt. Wilson from Chantry Flats
San Gorgonio
Weekend in Mammoth Lakes right before our planned summit date

I’ll be blogging about each of these hikes, including our weekend getaway in Mammoth!

The first training hike we did was El Cajon Mountain, in San Diego. We’d heard this hike was hard, long and uphill both ways, but it was close to home and a good base to see where we were with our hiking fitness level. We drove out to do the hike on a Sunday morning in the midst of unusual rainy weather. It turned out to be pretty nice weather for the hike though, and I think it would have been a lot harder if it were a sunny, warm day. It’s a pretty exposed hike, so I could see it getting hot quickly. Luckily it was nice and cool for us due to the overcast morning.

Overall the hike wasn’t too crowded, there were definitely other people but everyone was spread out enough that we didn’t feel like we were all on top of each other. The same cannot be true for some of the other LA hikes we did! The trail itself was pretty easy to follow as well, except for the very end. There are trail markers which help, but the end is a bit of a scramble and there were some moments when we weren’t sure where the hike was. It was easy to get back on track, and honestly some of the confusion for us may have been the dense fog! We got to the top and couldn’t see a thing. I’ve heard there’s usually some pretty impressive views though, on a clear day.

As far as the difficulty of the hike, let’s just say that people weren’t joking when they told us the hike was uphill, both ways, even though it was an out and back hike. There are lots of hills on this hike and even though the way down is just that, mostly down, there were still some sneaky, challenging hills after already doing a lot of climbing. Overall it wasn’t as challenging as I expected, but I think a lot of that was because of the cool weather we had. I’d probably do it again, just for the sole purpose of seeing the views that we missed due to the fog! At least some blue skies started coming out on the way back…