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Sometime around 3 a.m. on July 5 last summer, as I drove along Whitney Portal Road, I thought about a lyric from Phoebe Bridgers’ album “Punisher.”
“Why would somebody do this on purpose when they could do something else?”
I was on my way to a trailhead where I would begin the hardest hike I’d ever done: a grueling 16-hour-long ascent to the top of Mt. Whitney. The excitement and butterflies from the past few weeks had become pure nerves. I hoped I had done enough training before my first attempt to hike to the top of the tallest mountain in the lower 48. It would be a 22-mile hike at elevation all in one day.