Missing Sierra backpacker fell to his death below Mount Whitney, just 2 miles into his trip

A backpacker who went missing on a trek from Mount Whitney to Yosemite Valley was found dead just two miles from his starting point, Inyo County Search & Rescue reported.

Harris Levinson had apparently died of an injury suffered in a fall, the searchers’ report said.

Levinson, 61, of Vashon Island, Wash., had set off June 23 from Whitney Portal on what was intended to be a 220-mile journey on the John Muir Trail, the search team’s report said. On July 9 he was reported missing by friends who were worried that he had neither contacted them nor picked up the food caches he had arranged farther up the trail.

The search area was narrowed using data from Levinson’s satellite messaging device, and his body was found along the North Fork of Lone Pine Creek below Lower Boy Scout Lake.

The area where Levinson died was not on the main Whitney Trail but an alternative called the Mountaineer’s Route — a more direct but steeper route to the summit, requiring scrambling on rocks. He was found at about 9,400 feet elevation, 1,000 feet higher than the Whitney Portal trailhead.

A friend who spoke to Levinson’s hometown paper, the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber, said Levinson chose the riskier route because he had not been able to get a permit for the Whitney Trail, which has a quota.

The paper said Levinson, a schoolteacher and theater artist, was an experienced hiker.

The Mountaineer’s Route has been the site of other recent misfortunes, including three deaths within a week in May of last year. One of those hikers, a Santa Rosa man, was fatally struck by falling rocks at Ebersbacher Ledges, very near where Levinson died.

Last month, a 14-year-old Santa Clarita boy suffered severe injuries when he began hallucinating and walked off a ledge while descending Mount Whitney. He and his father had ascended the peak by the Mountaineer’s Route but were reportedly coming down via the trail.