The single strangest thing about Mt. Whitney are the middle-aged foreign men you see coming up the side of the mountain in the middle of the day. First come their kids usually. The Japanese cats are the weirdest ones -- the kids look like they've stepped off some subway someplace and ended up here in America in the year 2001 and are heading up the hill with their urban-ready clothing and piles of electronica. Up ahead no doubt will be another subway platform they can step on and dissapear into whatever future timeline they came from.

The older men follow. They are usually no younger than fourty, though most appear to be nearly fifty or so. They come from all walks of life and all appear to have walked from their living room at the end of the work day upon this mountain which so many others have spent entire months preparing for. They are flabby, soft. Most look ill prepared. The Japanese gentlemen are the most square, usually wearing soaked-through undershirts and perhaps some towel. They are laden down with backpacks last made in the mid-80s, metal frames and gear causing them to sway with every loafered footstep.

On my back is the most minimalist pack I could bring and I still have fourty-eleven things. I wonder about these old men and their foolish footwear and worry about them some. None of them look particularly prepared for the reality of life above 8,000' -- few carry water.

I figure most must turn back well before the last series of steppes that brings you to the final trail camp. Perhaps the camp itself is enough for most men. Like a well-provided outpost it has rudimentary waste facilities and a heady air of completion.

A sane man could see that the wall was not particularly fun, but those of us who climb it do so because we have to.

There's always the flip answer that climbers give which is "because its there", but that's so much bullshit. You don't climb it because its there, you climb it because its there and you have to.

This makes the process all the more agonizing. At each painful moment when turning back seems all the more cheerful you press yourself on because you know that if you don't you'll simply have that same issue tomorrow or next year or twenty years down the line when you are an ill-prepared Japanese gentleman swaggering his way up the trail.

You will be here again -- you have to see the top.

Realizing when this makes sense is the technical aspect of the trip and hikers usually use the term to differentiate whether some piker will be able to hack it.

"Technical" on Whitney means a lot of things. For one it means plane "technical". There are ice fields with dubious handholds; narrow, exposed trails with wickedly steep, jagged rocks hundreds of feet below. There is plenty of sun and not too much water. There are many miles even more elevation.

These are what make it "technical" in the REI, don't-bring-your-loafers evironment.

Where Whitney gets technical though is with your soul, at your gut level.

You start your trail day at 4 a.m., passing through the portal and the last outpost of civilization.

At first twilight, the point at which you no longer really need your lamp, you pass the first campsite, then some small streams and lakes and then the sun comes up and you see this marvelously high, monsterously jagged peak above you and you will know not all is well.

I had the misadventure to ask a fellow hiker: "is that the top?"

Their response, "no", did not bode well. Perhaps some peak just beyond.

And you hike until it is well past daybreak and the sun is hitting you hard as you hit the second camp and its not really until then, not until you've reached about six trail miles and two thousand feet or so that you really realize where the hell it is you are going.

You can't even really see where you are going, not well. The naked eye can't really see that far and its probably best that you don't know where you are going.

In my two trips up this mountain, I have only ever seen one out-of-place hiker get further than this. They were less than five switchbacks into the 96 or so that cover the hillside towards Trail Crest, and thats when the shit really hits the fan.

Trail Camp is some 11,000' up or so: nearly as high as Mt. Lassen in the north. The switchbacks comence to raise you up to about 13,000' and you know that somewhere in here you pass through the 11,000' feet that makes this a truly textbook hike.

Above 11,000' the air is thin and the body is working extra hard just to stay on its feet. Put a bunch of crap in a pack and commence to walking uphill for a number of hours and you run the risk of two issues: high altitude puliminary edema or HAPE and high altitude cerebral edema or HACE.

Both relate to your bodies systemic overload and its reversion into a state of uncollected cells in a briney bath: your body starts shedding fluid into locations it really shouldn't like, say, your lungs (HAPE) or your head (HACE).

HACE is really the sissy one, though its probably the one that kills more people. HAPE kills people deader because unless you can get the victim down in short order they are going to be a trail monument as they drown in their own fluids. There's nothing you can do for a person with HAPE if they go into pulminary arrest except watch them die, but that's a pretty rare one.

HACE is more common and probably gets more people into trouble, though fluid doesn't actually have to enter the brain to get the mind spinning.

My own perilous journey with high altitude sickness began with the switchbacks the first year. You realize about twenty switchbacks in that you have been counting. Further, that everyone you pass on the trail is also secretly counting. At a certain point you will forget what number you are on: is it twenty five going on twenty six or twenty six or was that last bend really twenty-seven.

At the time you'll dismiss it as a boring issue.

By the second or third time you have this dialog with yourself, you realize perhaps all is not well in brain land.

At 13,500 and Trail Crest I realized I was at the end of my first trek. I was ill equipped for the conditions beyond: nearly out of water and missing a number of critical supplies I was faced with the daunting prospect of going forward solo and perhaps not making it back or coming back the next year and maybe not making it back as far.

The kicker were the guys coming back with their Camelback hoses frozen. I didn't even have a windbreaker, only a t-shirt and shorts.

In many ways, I was much like the old Japanese hikers.

My second year I was a lot more prepared. I had better equipment, trusted critical supplies to my own care. Made sure I would make it up.

Past Trail Crest, life simply does not get better until you turn around and head back.

The air is thin here, you are exposed. The trail -- up to this point lovingly maintained and fairly graded -- decomposes into a mess of drops and rises along crumbling trails.

At times it is like another planet. Nothing much grows up here. Occasionally you'll see some sort of rock varmit, a bird or a rodent, but not much else.

The landscapes are obscene, you can see lakes far off, mountain ranges stepping into infinity.

The altitude truly seeps into your brain along these trails. I suffered greately from altitude sickness, though I didn't know it at the time.

At the time I concentrated on my breathing. Keep the breathing regular, mellow. Don't get over-respiratory or you'll get ill.

At a certain point, even that doesn't matter. I remember taking ten steps before I would get ill and the countdown would go like this.

One and I am feeling fine.

Two and three and I'm still well.

Four and five have slowed my steps some.

The agonizing headache that has been my companion for the past half hour steps in at six and seven and by eight and nine I am now counting down.

Three more steps and I will feel too sick to walk.

Two more steps and I will feel two sick to walk.

One more step...

By this time I have abandoned my backpack along the trial someplace and I figure this is probably what people who go to die probably do too. Just drop shit off and maybe you'll need it on the way back and, well, maybe you won't.

I didn't really need anything in it anyways -- my water was the only thing I could use and I could hardly get that down.

My girfriend appeared as a mirage when I was in the depths of a depression brough on by the sickness. One thinks of turning back, that there will only be mercy with turning back. One realizes the futile nature of turning back, that there will only be a next time. Maybe this will be the last time before I puss out and make it a two-day'er.

Maybe this is my last hurrah. Hank has folded from this year's fete -- maybe I will be the one who doesn't make it this year.

You temper this with the thought that if you make a wrong decision up here you will likely be difficult to rescue. The helicopters that remove the waste from the trail camp seem to struggle down there and this is so much further up.

You've seen the drill just a few hours before, the onload, the roar of the rotors as they struggled to pull up.

No doubt you'd make it, but it'd be a problem for everybody else involved and as a conscientous hiker you really don't want to be that sort of problem, that sort of person.

Leave that to the middle-aged hikers at 10,000' where then can easily be evacutated down.

Still, my girlfriend pulled me through, appearing like some leperauchaun perpetually some distance ahead. Never so far that I would give up and not so close that I would have a companion in my misery, but just far enough to go and join for a moment before she had to pick up and keep moving before fatigue set in.

The top really brought no glory, just the overwhelming sense of completion, that the trail was finally over.

Some guys sat and ate their lunch at the edge of the world there where the face falls off for a couple thousand feet before coming to rest in the lake of the trail camp below.

A glider came whizzing by the mountain top, its control surfaces shreiking in the wind that whips off the face.

We are all at one with God for that moment, I suppose.

I check out the cabin, sign the guestbook and head down, glad to have that over.

Nausea sets in again at Trail Camp after I eat too much and my overly-taxed body wants me to just lay down some place and not move for a while.

Pizza is to be had in town, though. Beer too if you know a place or two that serves beer late. You get into the parking lot and its pushing late afternoon. Down into town where you have a hotel room with the AC cranked up to permafrost and the shades drawn to form a cave. Back to the hotel room with the shower and the fresh sheets that feel like heaven.

It will be dark again when you awake disjointedly. Pizza can be had fairly late as can beer if you know the right joints.

There's plenty of TV on and a good continental breakfast to be had in the morning. You can get some kit, go back to your snoring for a bit and hit a lunch in one of the road towns long in the shadow of Mt. Whitney.