Mount Whitney: The Summit and the Naming War

The wall of granite you see to the west from Lone Pine is fourteen thousand five hundred five feet high at its peak. That is the highest point in the contiguous United States, and what is remarkable is not the number but the visual fact: you are standing in a valley at roughly thirty-seven hundred feet, and fifteen miles west the terrain goes up eleven thousand feet in that distance. There is no equivalent visual transition from highway to summit anywhere else in the continental forty-eight states.

The mountain is named Mount Whitney, after Josiah Whitney, head of the California Geological Survey in the eighteen sixties. He did not make the first ascent. Three fishermen from Lone Pine, Charles Begole, John Lucas, and A. H. Johnson, reached the summit in August of eighteen seventy-three while on a fishing trip. They arrived at the top before the official survey party that had organized for the first ascent. The naming dispute that followed was eventually settled by the federal Board on Geographic Names.

The peak the survey party eventually climbed was initially named after the fishermen. That name did not stick. The legislature assigned the summit to Josiah Whitney, who never climbed it.

Today the Whitney Zone lottery issues approximately one hundred fifty overnight permits per day during the primary hiking season, making this one of the most heavily managed backcountry approaches in the country. The peak draws several thousand people a year. From the valley floor on Highway Three Ninety Five, the route to the summit is visible as a faint line along the ridgeline above the Alabama Hills.

The fishermen got there first. The bureaucrat got his name on it.