Day 6 was our light day, we were hiking only 7 miles this day, to get to Guitar lake so we can rest for the summit push the next day. After a leisurely start, around 9am, we started the hike. Every other day, we woke up at 5am and left the trailhead before 7am. We started seeing a lot of JMT and PCT hikers in the trail and ended up talking to a lot of them. Plenty of meadows right off Wallace Creek.
There is a fork to the left towards Guitar lake and AllTrails insisted we missed the fork. We ended up backtracking half a mile down the mountain only to realize that AllTrails was wrong and it continues to suck. I highly recommend not spending the $100 for AllTrails pro account and spend it instead on Guthook or something other app that works. This is the fork:
You start seeing Crabtree meadow from the trail to Guitar lake.
We did not take the turnoff to visit the Crabtree ranger station, but continued towards Guitar lake instead. A couple of miles in, you start seeing Mt. Whitney for the first time.
Multiple beautiful meadows along the route and we had lunch in one of those.
We arrived at Timberline lake.
Towards the last mile near Guitar lake, Mt. Whitney looms over you. It slowly dawns upon you that you have to summit this mountain.
We settled in early and filled water in the creek that feeds Guitar lake. Guitar lake is very exposed at 11,500 feet altitude and weather helped us quite a bit and there was little wind to speak of.
I missed setting auto focus correctly in my Nikon Z6 + 14-30 S lens and missed every single one of the 600+ shots of the fabulous sunset we witnessed on Mt. Whitney. I missed every single shot, but I do have this brief video from my phone.
I did get one good photo of Mt.Whitney lit by the moon.
We slept early that night to wake up at 4am for the summit push.
Garmin map for day 5 and day 6: