The Brothers, June 26-27, 1999

 

We started the trek into The Brothers late Saturday morning. Upon reaching the trailhead, we counted 49 cars. Yikes! This place is popular. Luckily, most of the cars belonged to day hikers, and all the rest were camping at Lower Lena Lake, which was less than halfway to our final destination. Coincidentally, the only others who were going to climb The Brothers this weekend pulled into the parking lot 10 minutes after we got there, and we knew them! Matt and Bethany had heard the east side of the mountain had good skiing. They also provided me with a thin foam pad they didn't need, after I realized I had forgotten my thermarest.

The Brothers seemed like a good destination on a weekend that was forecast to be cloudy with showers. Being on the east side of the Olympics, the weather was usually a bit better. The Brothers can be seen from Seattle, and I'd noticed during the previous week that they'd often been in the sun, while the Cascades were in thick clouds.

A rest stop at Lena Lake. Some day hiker guy. A close up of this guy

Upper end of Lower Lena Lake.

 

We took a quick break at greenish Lower Lena Lake, where Matt and Bethany, skis on their backs, caught up to us. Soon after, we left Matt and Bethany, and the noisy boy scout troops and camp fire smoke, and continued on The Brothers trail, up "The Valley of the Silent Men". It was the last we would see of Matt and Bethany this weekend, as our routes diverged a few miles up the valley.

We met a group of 4 coming out. They looked to be in their early twenties, and were carrying wooden ice axes and one of them had an old hemp rope looped around his shoulder. Interesting. They told us they had turned around because there was too much snow, and they lost the trail. Silly!

The trail soon started disappearing under the snow, but it was fairly easy to find it again. Travel was slow due to the snow and all the fallen trees. We thought of M & B following us through here with skis sticking out of their packs, and decided we were glad we weren't coming to ski.

A half hour up the Brothers trail from Lena Lake.

The stream that runs through "The Valley of the Silent Men" (with 50 speed film in my camera, I was hurtin' for a tripod in the dark forest, but a rock served the purpose, albeit somewhat crookedly).

 

Snow on rock.

 

Eventually, after some debate, we realized we were at the point where we should branch off the main valley, and head up another valley to the south side of the mountain. Overcast but dry until now, it began to rain.

We continued up the valley and passed several avalanche chutes with piles of destroyed trees. There were warnings that this spring's avalanches would be "50 year events", with slides extending well down into the trees; this was definitely the case in this part of the Olympics. There were whole sections of forest that were now just tree stumps, what was left after the slides tore them up.

Some of the forest destruction on the south side of The Brothers. My camera was fogged up for the next day, so excuse the picture quality.

Hmm... this avalanche chute got a bit wider this spring.

We set up camp at the bottom of an avalanche chute with a good view of the south face of The Brothers. Well, it would have been a good view if it wasn't foggy and raining. As we cooked dinner and went to sleep, the rain let up.

To supplement my thin, borrowed sleeping pad, I collected conifer branches to place under the tent. I had been a bit worried about cutting "pine boughs" from the trees to sleep on, in this day of low-impact camping, but the snowy winter made that a moot point, as there were cedar/hemlock branches littered everywhere on the snow (from the avalanches, and branches collapsing under deep snow).

 I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and a hole in the clouds above me revealed one star. Hmm... sunny in the morning?

In the morning, visibility was way down, to only a few hundred feet. We did eventually make a summit attempt, starting at around 11am. There are no pictures unfortunately because I left my camera back at camp, in an attempt to force the sun to come out. The sun did poke through the clouds now and then, making me think that the Mountain Gods had noticed I left my camera behind, but any sun was short-lived, and visibility stayed very bad. We hiked up the most obvious chute until it ended in a steep narrow chasm, and traversed right to a snowy ridge, which we followed to another rocky dead end (well, maybe not, but scrambling on steep wet rock in plastic boots is no fun). At this point we were only 700ft below the summit according to our altimeters. No views, but the scenery was still impressive. Snow chutes, small spires of loose rock, and narrow gullies surrounded us, fading mysteriously into the mist. There was a snow chute to our right that looked like it might continue to the summit, but it disappeared into whiteness a few hundred feet above us, so we couldn't be sure. It also lacked the tell-tale glissade track we had followed on the lower chute. It also looked very steep as it faded from visibility, and we had just come up a short 40 degree snow slope that the soft snow made kind of sketchy. It also had several large glide cracks in it, almost like crevasses on a glacier. And, we were also pretty sure that if we did make it up, we wouldn't be able to see anything anyways. We decided to turn around.

Getting back to camp was a quick 2500ft glissade.

We packed up, then headed further up the valley to explore a bit more and check out more of the destruction before leaving. My camera was very fogged up, hence the "soft focus" of these pictures.

Greg, log surfing.

We discovered a little pool of water in a creek that had made several large cracks in the snowpack around it, like a mini-glacier. We played in them.

Stephen beside the biggest crack.

Stephen in the crack.

Stephen tried to kick a chunk of snow off. He succeeded, but also kicked himself off into the water. Doh!

Stephen checking out the damage after falling in (see the collapsed snow on the right).

 

The hike out took longer than we expected, about four hours. We reached the car around 8pm, and headed back out to civilization. I noticed I had gotten a sunburn, despite the fact that we were in a whiteout/clouds/rain for most of the weekend. Burned! A while later, back on the highway, we looked back, and, lo and behold, there was The Brothers, poking its head out about a thousand feet above a thick cloud layer that still smothered the mountains. Burned! Once again, the Olympics get the last laugh!

The inlet of Lower Lena Lake.