Not all trails are this clear!
Before I did the East Face of Mt. Whitney a couple summers ago, I found a topo online of the route. It seemed pretty good and so I printed it out and took it with me on the route. I didn’t bother taking any other info up. Well, I got up on the route and realized that the topo wasn’t quite as good as I thought it was…
This has happened to me over and over again. So now I’m wiser. I now take with my all of the info I can find, especially for long approaches and tricky descents. Copy all of the info and paste it into a Word document. Make the text and margins really small, print on both sides of the page, and you should be able to condense all information onto a single piece of paper.
In short, take all the beta you can find! Unless, of course, you WANT to get lost on the approach. Or, more likely, if you want adventure on the route itself…
