A Boko-Maru With Gaia: Road to Whitney

We got a late start out of Kennedy Meadows on 6/13 at 6:30pm. Our intentions of evenly splitting the mileage between three days quickly faded when we stopped for dinner five miles in and decided we didn't want to hike any further. That was a stupid decision! We wanted to summit Whitney on the 16th to honor our Dad's 52 birthday and celebrate Father's Day. It also happened to fall a week before the five year anniversary of his death.
When we woke up, we knew that we would have to pull some insane mileage. High mileage in the Sierras is often difficult due to extreme elevation changes and rockier terrain, so most people only average 14 mile days. We intended to hike double that.
Having cowboy camped the night before, we woke up freezing and reluctant to get out of our sleeping bags. We soon realized Sierra mornings are cold! We hiked through a huge meadow for several quick miles until we reached the Kern River bridge to take a short snack break. An hour and a half later, we set out to do our next twenty miles. Upon hearing our high mile Sierra plans, Amigo wished us a sarcastic good luck. It turns out that Amigo's intuition was right since those twenty miles were uphill, forcing us to hike into the night. We hiked 27 miles that day.
The morning of the 15th, we got to start our morning with seven pleasant downhill miles before the rest of the day's climb up. Lindsay was having a rough day, suffering from a headache was was likely caused by the high elevation gain. Upon running into two equestrian park rangers, she fantasized about the horses taking her the next four miles past Ryan to beat beat him to Chicken Spring Lake. She imagined yelling, "haha sucka!" As she passed him by. In reality, Ryan beat her to the lake by about 40 minutes. As we napped at Chicken Spring Lake with our packs of food next to us, a squirrel jumped right on Ryan's back in an attempt to snatch a snack. It was unsuccessful. After dinner at the lake, we hiked the last few miles up to catch a glimpse of the sun sinking behind the distant mountains casting an orange glow over the beautiful meadow far below. It was at this point when we had a brief moment of waterworks caused by both exhaustion and the anticipation of the big day awaiting us. As we caught our first glimpse of Mt Whitney's silhouette, tears continued to flow. We hiked into the night dropping down the mountain to a river where we shared snacks with Cartwheel, Junior, Hippie Long Stockings, Dixie, and No Bad Days. We finished our night by hiking 2 miles straight up to the top of a pass where we cowboy camped in the frigid temperatures. We had hiked 28 miles that day.
The morning of the 16th had arrived. We only had 5 miles to go until the 8.6 mile Whitney side trail to the highest peak in the contiguous lower 48 states. The hike down was really spectacular as we could see the jagged cliffs that we would soon be climbing amidst the backdrop of the lush green meadows. We ran into fellow thru hiker friends at the trail junction, set up camp, and set out around noon to summit with them. We had worked hard the last couple of days to put ourselves in this position to ascend the peak. Our energy and spirits were high; our emotions were turbulent.