April 14, South Brother, Olympic National Park

So I wasn't really thinking of Skiing the Brothers this weekend but we really didn't want to lift ski on Saturday and none of the usual's sounded good.  So Allen, Mary, Megan and I decided on the Brothers just because Allen could see them from work!

We left the car at 6:30am and hit 60% snow about 1/3 of a mile from Lake Lena.  From there we hiked in tennis shoes and boots to the intersection with the Valley of the Silent Men trail at the N end of the lake.  We then skinned more or less on the trail to before the Climbers camp where we crossed the creek on snow and skinned on up to the lower meadow.   We decided conditions looked safe to continue, and temps stayed cool due to some afternoon clouds.  After the meadow we followed the standard route to the top.   Lower down we had to work through avalanche debris that probably came early in the week.  The upper portion of the hourglass had runnels but we figured it would be hard to ever find good ski conditions and decided to continue.  At Lunch Rock Allen and Megan decided the upper conditions didn't look worth the effort and headed down to the meadow.  So it was up to Mary to kick steps through the upper gully as I was about out of gas, about 300' from the top I found enough energy for the last bit.

We were able to ski from about 15' below the summit, the top was slightly baked 4" of new, chute was runneled on the left and ok on the right so every other turn was good.  We managed to avoid a chunk of the avy debris by staying in the benches below and left of the hourglass bottleneck.  At the meadow we joined Allen & Megan and continued down to where we crossed the creek at 3,000', then on skins down the trail (some ups and downs).  We crossed two bridges with skis on and passed one with a broken hand rail via a snow covered log jam.  Trip time was 9 hours up and 5 hours out, a long but satisfying day!  No significant route finding problems helped keep the travel smooth and efficient!