I'm Andrea, I'm 31, I work at a desk in the Central Valley Monday through Friday, and on as many weekends as I can manage between June and October I drive up into the Sierra and walk up something tall. I am not a climber. I own no rope and I never want to be somewhere I'd need one. What I like are the peaks you can reach on your own two feet by a trail or a use-path or a bit of easy scrambling where your hands are for balance, not for hanging on. The Sierra Nevada is full of those, including some very high ones, and this page is my record of them.

I keep this log mostly for myself, so I'll remember what worked and what I'd do differently. But if you're where I was three years ago, sitting in the flatlands looking at the mountains and thinking they're only for people with ice axes, I hope it shows you otherwise. Big days, yes. Early starts, yes. Ropes, no.

Elevations are from the topo maps and the summit signs; where they disagree I picked one. Mileages are round trip.

June 26 — Lembert Dome, 9,450 ft
Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite. About 3 miles, 850 ft of gain.
First one of the year, on purpose an easy one: the Tioga Road had only been open a couple of weeks and there was still snow in the shade. Trail around the back and then bare granite to the top. The whole of Tuolumne Meadows laid out below, green, with the river winding through it. Sat on top for an hour. Legs remembered what they were for. A good place to find out whether you like walking on bare, sloping granite; if this makes you nervous, the domes and Half Dome's cables will too, and it's better to learn that here.

July 10 — Half Dome, 8,842 ft, by the cables
Yosemite Valley. About 16 miles, 4,800 ft of gain, from Happy Isles via the Mist Trail.
The big one everybody knows. Started walking at 5:15 a.m. by headlamp, up the Mist Trail past Vernal and Nevada Falls, both roaring with snowmelt and soaking everything, then the long climb through Little Yosemite Valley and up the shoulder. The cables go up the last 400 feet or so of the dome's east face: two steel cables on posts, with boards across every ten feet to stand on. The rock between them is smooth and steep, and the cables are exactly as scary as everyone says for the first fifty feet and then just hard work. Bring gloves; there's a pile of old ones at the bottom but I wouldn't count on it. I was on the cables by 10 and on top by 10:30, before the crowds and the afternoon clouds, with the Valley three thousand feet straight down and the whole high country behind. Down the cables facing in, one board at a time. Back at the car at 4:45. Everything hurt. Would do it again tomorrow.

July 31 — Mount Hoffmann, 10,850 ft
From the May Lake trailhead off the Tioga Road. About 6 miles, 2,000 ft of gain.
Hoffmann sits almost exactly in the geographic center of Yosemite, and the view from the top proves it: every direction is park. Easy trail to May Lake, then a use-trail up the meadow and a bit of easy boulder-hopping to the summit. The last hundred feet are the only place I put a hand down. Marmots on top expecting lunch; they got none from me, and shouldn't from you either (see below). This is the peak I'd recommend to anyone who's done Lembert Dome and wants the next step.

August 14–15 — Mount Whitney, 14,494 ft, by the main trail
From Whitney Portal, east side of the range. 22 miles, about 6,100 ft of gain. Overnight.
The highest point in the lower 48, and the peak with the longest paperwork. The main trail is quota-controlled from May through October, and the permits go by a lottery run by the Forest Service; you mail in an application in February and find out in the spring. I put in for four dates and got my third choice. It is a walk, not a climb, the whole way, but it's a very long, very high walk, and it is the altitude that turns people around, not the terrain.
Day 1: Whitney Portal (8,360 ft) to Trail Camp (about 12,000 ft), 6 miles. Slept badly, as you do at 12,000 feet. Headache at bedtime; drank a liter of water and it eased.
Day 2: Up at 3:30, walking at 4:15 by headlamp. The famous switchbacks above Trail Camp, 99 of them by the usual count (I lost count in the 60s), to Trail Crest at 13,600 ft, where you cross into the national park and the whole west side of the Sierra opens up in the sunrise. Then the last two miles along the back of the crest, past the windows between the pinnacles, to the summit hut and the top at 8:40 a.m. Clear, cold, windless, and I was the fourth person up that day. Stayed 40 minutes, signed the register, felt terrible in the best possible way. Back to Trail Camp by noon, packed up, out to the Portal by 4. Ate a hamburger at the Portal store that I will remember on my deathbed. Best advice: spend a night at the trailhead or at Lone Pine before you start, and read the altitude section below. I met three people on the switchbacks who were going down sick, and they'd all driven up from sea level the morning before.

September 4 — Mount Dana, 13,053 ft
From the Tioga Pass entrance station, Yosemite. About 6 miles, 3,100 ft of gain.
Dana is the second-highest peak in Yosemite and it starts from the highest paved road in the park, so the whole thing fits in a morning if you start early and are honest about your pace. There's no official trail, but there's a well-worn use-path from the pass, up through the meadow, then a long steep slog on scree and talus with the route marked by ducks (small rock cairns) most of the way. Nothing technical; all of it steep and loose and breathless. On top at 9:50, and Mono Lake lay below to the east like a plate of pewter. Fifteen minutes on top before the wind chased me down. Nearly 3,000 feet of downhill on loose rock is harder on the knees than the climb was on the lungs; trekking poles would have been smart.

September 18 — Clouds Rest, 9,926 ft
From the Sunrise Lakes trailhead at Tenaya Lake. About 14 miles, 2,300 ft of gain, plus some back.
Best view in Yosemite, and I'll argue it with anyone. Higher than Half Dome and looking down on it, with the Valley beyond. The trail climbs hard for the first mile and a half, then rolls along, then finishes on a granite ridge that narrows to a few yards wide with a long way down on either side. It's a walk, but it's a walk where you pay attention. Clear and cold; first frost on the meadows on the way in. Only six people on top. The season is closing, and it felt like it.

1999 total: six summits, one turnaround, about 67 miles of walking, roughly 19,000 feet of up (and, less pleasantly, of down).

August 28 — Mount Gibbs, 12,773 ft. Dana's neighbor, another walk-up from the Tioga Pass area, with a long ridge approach. I got a late start (9 a.m., which in August is a late start), and by 11:30 I was at about 11,500 feet on the ridge watching the cumulus over the crest go from white puffs to gray towers in the space of twenty minutes. I could see the summit. It was maybe an hour away. I stood there and argued with myself for five full minutes, which is five minutes longer than the argument should have taken, and then I turned around.

The storm broke about forty minutes later, with me well down in the trees, and the thunder went on for an hour. I sat in the car and watched the ridge I'd been on disappear into the cloud and felt, in order: disappointed, foolish for starting late, and then very glad. I am putting this here because a peak log that lists only summits is a lie of omission. The mountain will be there next July. The point is that I will be too.

I'm not a doctor. Read something written by one before you go high. But here's what three seasons of going from 300 feet to 13,000 feet on weekends has taught me.

• Above about 8,000 feet, most people feel something. Headache, poor sleep, no appetite, breathing hard on easy ground. That's ordinary. It's altitude sickness (acute mountain sickness) when it gets worse: a headache that won't quit, nausea, dizziness, real fatigue out of proportion to the walk.
• The cure is down. Not water, not aspirin, not toughing it out. If someone is getting worse, especially if they're confused, stumbling, or coughing and short of breath at rest, they go down, now, with company. Those last signs can mean the serious kinds, which can kill you, and they don't care how fit you are.
• Sleep high the night before, if you can. A night at 8,000 or 9,000 feet before a big peak makes a real difference. Whitney Portal, Tioga Pass, the campgrounds along the Tioga Road. Better still, two nights.
• Drink more than you want to. A liter more than seems reasonable. Pale urine is the check. Cold, dry, high air pulls water out of you with every breath.
• Go slow enough that you could talk. The rest step: step, pause, step, pause, on the steep parts. It looks silly. It gets you up.
• Don't camp higher than you have to. On Whitney, plenty of people camp at Trail Camp (12,000 ft) and plenty of them sleep terribly; Outpost Camp (10,400 ft) is lower and you'll sleep better, at the cost of a longer summit day.
• Fitness doesn't protect you. I've been passed on the switchbacks by sixty-year-olds who live at 7,000 feet, and I've passed twenty-five-year-old runners lying green on rocks. Acclimatization is the variable. Respect it.

Sierra summers are mostly dry and clear, which lulls you. But on a warm afternoon, especially in July and August, the sun heats the high country, the air rises, and by one or two o'clock the puffy clouds over the crest can build into thunderstorms with astonishing speed. See Gibbs, above. Lightning on a bare summit or an open ridge is the most likely way for a walk-up peak to kill you, and it is completely avoidable.

So: be on the summit by late morning and heading down by noon, whatever it takes, which usually means starting in the dark. Watch the sky from the moment you can see it: if the clouds are already building at 9 a.m., they'll be storms by noon, and you should plan to be low by then. If you hear thunder, even far away, get off the high ground: down off the ridge, out from under the lone tree, away from the cables (Half Dome's cables in a thunderstorm are exactly what they sound like). If your hair stands up or the rocks start to hum, you waited too long; crouch low on your toes, away from the group, and wait it out.

Also: it snows in every month of the year up high. I've had sleet on Dana in September and my fleece and rain shell have earned their space in the pack every single trip.

This is what's in my pack for a long day on a walk-up. It weighs about 12 pounds with three liters of water. I've stopped adding to it and started asking what I can leave out.

Every one of these peaks has more people on it each year, and the high country is slow to heal. The rules aren't complicated.

• Pack it out. All of it, including orange peels, which take years up there, and toilet paper. On Whitney there are toilets at the camps; above them, everything you make comes down with you, and yes, I mean it.
• Stay on the trail or the rock. Alpine meadows and the little cushion plants on the summits are decades old and a bootprint lasts for years. Walk on granite, on sand, on the existing path. Don't cut switchbacks.
• Don't feed the animals. The marmots on Hoffmann and the chipmunks at Trail Camp are fat and bold because people feed them, and it's bad for them. Keep your pack closed, and hang or canister your food overnight; the bears in Yosemite are experts.
• Leave the summit register for the next person and leave the rocks, flowers and arrowheads where they are. Take the photo, not the thing.
• Be quiet up there. Somebody hiked eleven miles for the silence.

1. Mount Gibbs, obviously. Starting at 5 a.m. this time.
2. Mount Langley, 14,026 ft, the southernmost 14,000-foot peak in the Sierra and, by the route from the Cottonwood Lakes over New Army Pass, another walk-up. Overnight, permit required.
3. Whitney again, in one day from the Portal, if the lottery is kind. People do it. I'd like to be one of them once.
4. Something on the east side in the fall, when the aspens turn. I've only ever seen them from the car.
5. Take someone. All six of this year's summits were solo, and I like that, but I'd like to watch somebody's face on top of Clouds Rest for the first time.

Winter plans: hike the foothills, get the knees looked at, and read every trip report I can find. The film from Whitney and Clouds Rest is at the drugstore; photos as soon as I can beg a scanner. Season's not quite over; if the Tioga Road stays open into October there may be one more.