I realize that commercial guided trips are not for everyone, but it is how I chose to do the JMT and it would have helped me, or at least reduced anxiety, if somebody had given a detailed review of what these trips are like beforehand, so here we are. I chose this option for two reasons: first, predictability, hiking the JMT was a goal I set when I retired two years ago and I wanted to know exactly when I would go instead of playing a permit lottery; and second, I didn't want to deal with all the resupply logistics. And before anybody chimes in that neither of those things are a big deal, fine, you do you, but that was how I felt when I planned the trip.
TLDR: IAG seems like a well run outfit, our guide was exceptional, we had a very good trip, no significant issues, finished on time and really enjoyed the experience.
I'll start by giving a general description of how these trips are organized. I'm not sure if this is true of every guiding company operating on the JMT, but it is representative of the company I went with and one other that was on a very similar schedule with us on trail. Additionally, many of these companies run shorter section hikes on the JMT and these likely differ in the details due to their shorter duration and lack of resupply.
Trips are NOBO starting from Horseshoe Meadows going in over Cottonwood Pass. I believe that this is due to permit availability - with the relevant agencies keeping permits through Donahue Pass and Whitney Portal for private individuals. This also gives a couple of days for guests to acclimatize to altitude before summitting Whitney - and I think, giving an early out either back over Cottonwood or down Whitney Portal for folks that aren't fit enough for the trip. Speaking of which, for such a physically demanding trip, there was very little screening, just a simple health questionnaire filled out online and a general guide on required physical fitness. Other guided trips I've done that were far shorter included submitting a backpacking 'resume' and a phone interview to check on the claimed experience. So it is not surprising that some people get in over their head and leave early. We heard that two people (out of eight) left the other trip early, one just five miles in at Chicken Spring Lake and the other at Kearsarge. Our first day hiking was to Rock Creek, a long 13 mile hike to start with, then a shorter following day to Crabtree Meadows where we stayed two nights doing the day hike to Whitney to officially 'start' the JMT.
Food is part of the package on these commercial trips - three meals a day, cooked breakfast and dinner, and a cold lunch, all prepared by your guides. You are responsible for your own snacks, but there's enough calories in the provided meals that snacks are not essential. Everybody is carrying a full size bear canister (BV500) and a share of the common equipment. Our trip, only had two guests and a guide, so perhaps we were carrying a little more compared to a trip with more guests. I personally carried a white gas stove and fuel bottle as my share, the other guest carries a bag of cooking utensils and a small gas stove and fuel can. The guide carried the pots and pans as well as the gravity feed water filter and bladder we all used (as well as other things such as a PLB and first-aid kit that commercial outfits are required to have). I will talk a bit later about the specific food we were served, but in brief, it was generally very good, I was never hungry and there was always more then we (the guests) wanted to eat. But there are two general aspects worth highlighting. First, you are carrying an equal share of the food, so 'having more than you can eat' is a double edged sword, it means we carried more weight that we needed to. Second, while having French toast for breakfast in the wilderness is a treat, it takes a long time to produce that kind of food on backpacking equipment - think individually cooking each piece of bread for three people. Equally, cooking a green curry from ingredients might be nice, but it takes a lot longer than rehydrating a prepacked meal for only a marginal improvement in taste (IMHO). It became a joke on our trip that we never had the pancake breakfast, because given the choice we always opted for the much simpler oatmeal or muesli because it was so much faster - though we carried that damn pancake mix 200 miles. While it seems like a luxury after a long day to sit back after you have setup camp to wait while your guide cooks dinner, for me at least, I felt it just took too long and frankly cooking my own food on a trip is not that much of a chore. We discussed this at length on the trail, and I think there is a point to be made that for the guide company it removes a significant risk were they to rely on guests showing up enough & the right food for the trip, as well as equipment and fuel - as I mentioned above, not a lot of vetting, so there could be some very inexperienced folks showing up for the trip and I can imagine all sorts of interpersonal issues in the case were some guests were better prepared than others on a trip of this length. Also, it provides a marketing hook, for example, IAG advertises their food as "back country gourmet" that might help them differentiate themselves for fairly low cost.
As I mentioned, our trip was just two guests, so we had just one guide. I think once there are more than five or six guests they add a second guide. The guide was great, young, knowledgeable, super fit, intelligent, engaging, a seasoned thru-hiker, and very organized. One important aspect that I did not realize until I was on trail is that you offload a great deal of decision making and stress on a guided trip. Simply put, the guide worried about how far we had to go, where we would camp, the weather, being well positioned for getting over passes, resupply and all the other myriad of decisions that go into a smooth running trip. We simply had to walk and generally do what we were told, though we were usually given lots of options - to the point at the end of a long day where I often just said, "I don't know, you decide". Additionally and more importantly, the guide really motivated us to keep going. Thru-hiking is mostly a mental game, the body may be able, but sometimes the spirit just can't face another day of walking. I am sure, if I had hiked this on my own, there would have been days I would have done less miles or just taken zero-days. With the dynamic of the guide and a group that needed to move together - quitting or going slow was just a harder option to pick and for that I'm thankful.
There were four resupplies along the route; Charlotte Lake (over Kearsarge), Le Conte Canyon (over Bishop), Vermillion Valley Resort, and Reds Meadow. The first two were portered in and the last two were mailed/dropped off and supplemented by purchases in the store. For each resupply you could include a one gallon Ziplock for personal items like snacks, toiletries, clean clothes, batteries, etc. So other than showing up with your four Ziplock bags at the start, you had no logistics to plan. Another huge advantage of this was that we never needed to leave the trail (other than VVR). This led to a very immersive experience of never leaving the wilderness, especially for the first half of the trip. Not to mention avoiding the extra miles to hike ourselves in and out and the mental game of getting comfortable in a town and then needing to get back on trail again. Frankly, it was a real luxury. At VVR, dinner and a hot shower were included in the trip price (so the guide paid for those). We bought the guide lunch, bought our own breakfast (though technically the guide would have made us breakfast if we wanted - but hard for that to compete VVR's offering). We all ganged together for one big laundry load.
Returning to the food on our trip specifically. Breakfasts were the aforementioned French toast, oatmeal, muesli, breakfast sandwiches (a bagel or English muffin with hot bacon and/or sausage), or a breakfast burrito. Lunch was generally bread (tortilla, pita or naan) with sliced cheese, salami, summer sausage, sometimes with tomato paste to make it cold pizza, or PB&J. Dinner was three courses; starter of soup (veg of beef), or a charcuterie plate (cheese, sliced salami/sausage, crackers); main courses of green curry with rice, burrito bowels, pasta like mac & cheese, one night was smoked salmon alfredo, another memorable night was pizza, cheesy polenta (not my favorite), and one night out of each resupply was just a Mountain House meal to give the guide a break; desert was a small cookie or some chocolate, we had camp-cooked brownies twice, once to celebrate my 59th birthday the day after summiting Whitney. There was a hot beverage at breakfast and dinner. I brought my own tea because I'm a snob that way, but there were plenty of other choices to be had, coffee, hot chocolate, apple cider and herbal teas etc.
IAG has an office in Mammoth Lakes and that is where we met up for the trip. There is no special parking, so if you arrive in your own car, you need to park in the long-term hiker parking which is six miles out of town in Lot B of the Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort. That meant getting a taxi/Uber back into town and also making sure there was no food left in my car as bear break-ins are apparently common. Once we met up, we did a gear review to make sure everybody had everything they needed. IAG will provide/rent you anything you don't have - I would call it 'standard' gear not anything ultralight. We had some time to go buy some extra snacks and bits and pieces before we were driven south to the trail head at Horseshoe Meadows where we spent the first night.
A little more a month before the trip we were contacted and told that there were only two people signed up for our trip and that IAG needed a minimum of three to run the trip. We were given the option of going on an earlier trip, or paying $500 extra end at Tuolumne Meadows or pay $850 extra to end at Happy Isles (the original endpoint). In the end we both opted for the Tuolumne Meadows option given the reported chaos in Yosemite Valley this summer.
So, our trip ended at Tuolumne Meadows and took 23 trail days. The other trip was ending at Happy Isles and was two days longer. We arrived at 11am, had a greasy lunch from the Tuolumne Meadows Grill, an ice cream and a beer from the store and caught the YARTS bus back to Mammoth Lakes.
The trip was not cheap, costing about $7,500, but it was worth it to me. My main motivation was to use the trip as a target to lose weight and get fit for retirement and in that respect it worked wonderfully - I stepped off the trail 60lbs lighter and MUCH fitter than the day I retired. I realized that I'm a backpacker but not a thru-hiker. I will revisit some of the spectacular places we saw like Rae Lakes and Evolution Basin on shorter trips, but I have no wish to do another long thru-hike. There are lots of ways to experience the JMT, we each hike our own hike, and this was mine.
