I have only climbed with Tim Blaney a handful of times and every one is a story. This climb, in particular, is a terrific one because it is also one of the very few climbs I’ve ever roped my twin brother, Ryan, into joining!
We decided to do a 7FJ day trip because of timing of some kind. I don’t remember who had a BBQ to get to, but that’s all the time we had, so we left off thoughts of an overnight and additional objectives. It was early July so daylight was not going to be a problem and we started out from Seattle kinda late. We then decided to detour into Leavenworth proper for some breakfast which set us back even farther. We had a run-in with a old dirtbag coming out of the restaurant bathroom who let us know he had “freshened it up for us.” Oh boy.
All these detours and we didn’t start heading down Phelps Creek trail until about 10:30. It was still earlyish in the season and we were on and off snow along the trail. Ryan, not a climber by trade, was decked out for the trip in workboots and a hardhat and declared himself “the most professional man on the mountain”. His professional footware, while fancy, wasn’t particularly good on snow but a random pair of yaktraks I threw in my pack for the trip saved the day. The creek crossings were all large, but we were able to ford them on various sizes and stability of logs.
From the Leroy Creek trail onward, it was all snow. With no trail, we went pretty straight at it. That headwall is not kidding around. It did provide ample time to practice our sick 7-fingered-jack gang signs. A lot of moating, forest route finding, and suffering later, we were in the upper Leroy basin and enjoying our first glimpse of the alpine.
At the basin, we took a lefthand traverse around the lake/swamp that forms in the meadows that are camping in the later season. At the base of the upper mountain, we navigated between snowy gullies and rocky thumbs taking whatever looked like the easiest or safest path.
At this point, we had been pushing pretty hard pretty fast. Between us and the summit was about 1000′ of steps to kick. Tim was starting to hit a wall, so Ryan and I took turns leading steps up the nice snow. We passed under the multiple sub summits and took a short water break about 50 yards from the summit. Tim was encouraging us to tag the summit without him because he didn’t think he could make it, but it was really and truly only like 50 yards away, so I wasn’t going to let that happen. I told him some lie about the decent route being off the back side and that he needed to make it to the summit. He was tired enough to believe it, and in a few short minutes, the three of us jack-asses were on the summit.
Tim was happy to learn that we, in fact, were not going down the back side. If you’ve been on the summit, then you have an idea as to why. We had a nice summit dinner and then headed back down. I brought a small rope because why not, and we had fun taking Batman rappels down some steep snow.
After not seeing so much as a bird the whole day, we saw a deer, and a porcupine in the lower forest on the way out (Tim also had no less than three woodland creatures commit suicide on his car on the dirt road out). The larger stream crossings on the way in were now real ragers on the way out. We were so tired and our feet already saturated from all the snow that we didn’t even attempt a dry ford and just waded straight through at full speed. It was a ring-out-your-boots-at-the-car kinda day.
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