In Pursuit of Wisdom

I, Shahriar and Tanjeem went upto a little over twelve thousand feet (trail camp) of Mount Whitney this 9 th July Friday. Despite failing in our attempt to summit, we learnt a lot about mountains and mountaineering in general during this day hike. I loved it! Shahriar processed all the paper works as team lead in early February this year to apply for 4 passes but finally we 3 friends went there. We picked up the passes one day before the hike from Lone Pine city and went for a practice hike that day. We hiked upto 9800 feet at Lone Pine lake in about 2 hours 20 minutes. This was the last point until which we could have gone without a hiking permit (remember that our hike permit was for next day). This practice helped us making an assessment on where we were physically and team-wise in terms of preparation for the summit. Unfortunately we found that we were under-prepared for this big hike and were not in best of our shape. For example, Tanjeem had a broken sleep cycle last few days...

Finally we are on our way to Mount Whitney. Yesterday I woke up a little earlier than 6 and finished some packing and grocery shopping for home. By the time Shahriar came to pick me in his Honda CRV it was around 8 AM. We picked Tanjeem from San Jose and drove towards Yosemite. We wanted to take the scenic Yosemite / Tioga Pass route to go the Lone Pine city instead of the boring I-5 route through Bakersfield. Tanjeem was under pressure in office works and couldn't sleep well last few days due to some practice hike disturbing his sleep cycle. So we started little late compared to what we were thinking initially (4/5 AM). We enjoyed the beautiful trees. roads, mountains and rock formations while passing through Yosemite / Tioga pass road. One thing that struck us much was seeing some people live in rock climbing. we couldn't anticipate how that was feasible for the people in the above video to take that trail (in fact no trail, it's solid rock) and make their foot steps on...

As Fourth of July long weekend was approaching, Shusmita wanted to travel to a nearby place and stay overnight to relax a bit from the city crowd. So Monterey/Carmel area on scenic Highway One or Napa Valley came to our mind immediately. I sent an email to my close friends/families here in Bay Area at 3 rd week of June asking if anyone else was interested to join us. In a lunch party of Hasinur’s house where we watched Brazil’s win over Chili in Fifa world cup 2010 South Africa, we found many of them there are interested for a group outing. So I, Sumit Bhai & Wali Bhai started searching for good places and hotels in Big Sur as this was what all the group members thought the right place for an overnight stay in the nature. We booked 3 suites in Big Sur Lodge one of which had an attached kitchen. We started for Monterey from Wali Bhai’s house a little after 8 o’clock in the morning of 4 th July. There were 8 cars in total 2 of which joined us a little later on the way. Fi...