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Mount Whitney Trip 1997.
The primary goal of this trip was to climb Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the 48 states. The mountain is 14,497 feet high. I'm not sure just when we decided to do this, but one major inspiration was a book by Hulda Crooks who climbed it 23 times, the last time when she was 91 years old. After deciding to do it we found that some friends from our astronomy club were also going to climb it as part of a backpacking trip. They said they would be on top on Aug 13 and that we should try to pick the same day. Permits were needed for entering the Whitney Zone, they could not be obtained more than 6 months ahead. Sharleen called exactly 6 months before our target date and had no trouble getting a permit for 4 people.
Another goal of the trip, one that depended on accomplishing the first goal, was to visit Hulda Crooks. She was now 101 years old and lived in a nursing home in southern California. We decided we wouldn't visit her unless we actually made it up Mt. Whitney.
A third goal was to visit a lot of our friends scattered along the way. This often took precedence over the fourth goal, which was sightseeing.
The photos were taken with a compact camera and the film was run through one-hour or overnight processing. The prints were scanned into the Dell laptop using Storm Technology's EasyPhoto Reader directly into PhotoShop 4.0. Photoshop was used to crop the images and adjust brightness and contrast. Additional processing was applied to some images, such as unsharp masking to bring out details for the inside shots of Aug 18. Also in several cases multiple images were blended together because a single image could not cover the desired area (see the storm photo on Jul 25).
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