Summary: 15-hour C2C main summit out-and-back, standard route, group of 6 experienced scramblers, hot sunny day (80+ F). The only notable snow travel was a ~200 ft steep snow climb. We used no traction; axes can be useful for that part, especially when descending, but we didn't all use them. We were bamboozled by a false-summit-gully, but otherwise navigation was easy with such an experienced group. We considered a traverse to north summit but it looked too treacherous.
Trailhead to Lena Lake: We started at 4:18 AM, having stayed overnight at the TH. This portion of trail was in excellent shape. We had first glimpse of the lake by 5:18 and met the first obstacle at the Lena Creek crossing. In the darkness we didn't realize there were plenty of crossable logs where the creek is flat so we meandered upstream and found a handline to cross. On the return we took the flat zone logs and bushwacked back to trail; much faster.
Lena Lake to The Brothers' Base Camp: This is much less-maintained trail, alternating between clear paths, abrupt drop-outs, bushwhacks, and blowdowns. Nothing too annoying though, especially since there is some flagging at some of the tricky sections. We arrived at base camp at about 7:15 and decided to continue a little further to what we figured would be the last major water source before the Burn Zone.
Base Camp to Burn Zone: The route finding gets quite tricky just leaving camp. The trail seemed to disappear often, but on the way back we had no trouble staying on it. Eventually we made it to open meadows that gave us the first strike of ominously warm sunshine. Around 8:00, we reached probably the last major water source, a snowy stream at ~3760' elevation, climbers' right of the trail. We took a long break to filter water and eat breakfast.
The Burn: This was nowhere near as bad I thought it would be. The trail is not hard to follow, the blowdowns aren't that dense and hard to get over, and it's not overgrown with pokey things. Maybe during other times of year it gets overgrown? I can imagine it would be terrible with mixed snow conditions, but on this day it was pretty easy and almost a little... fun. We exited The Burn around 9:00 and found ourselves at the base of the first scree slope.
Burn Zone to Hourglass: The route steepens appreciably after leaving the Burn. The first scree field felt very slow, and we found on our way back that there was a bit of a path on climber's left that would have been a little nicer to have ascended. We got up to about 5100' and traversed to the right, into the trees where paths converged to an obvious trail that took us up through a mix of trees and scree until we arrived at the bottom of the Hourglass, around 6000`, at about 10:30.
The Hourglass: This is the second major scree field (really a convergence of many scree channels, hence the name) and you can either go straight up or, as we did, cut left and ascend that flank partway, then traverse right to the top end. This brought us to the only remaining extended section of snow, 200' ascent up one of the gullies feeding into the Hourglass. Half of us kicked steps up the snow, and while myself and others scrambled on rock on the left flank. Once past the snow we scrambled some more up the final gully before the summit but...
Wrong summit: We missed the final right turn to the summit rock scramble and ended up doing borderline-class-4 scrambling up to a small sub-peak. We realized the mistake when we saw a definitely-class-4-or-5 downclimb to get back on track and decided to turn back and found the right way up. It's a right turn before the top of the gully, at a notch marked by a huge, obvious cairn, oops.
Summit: Back on track, we followed the obvious trail along the south faces of two subpeaks and curved up to a pleasant class 3 rock scramble before summiting a little before 12:00. The view is easily one of the best in the state of Washington. We scoped out the traverse to the North peak and it was clear why most (maybe all?) trips we'd read about that traversed between the two went from North to South: the downclimb off South summit looked insane and we were definitely not feeling it after over 7 hours of ascension, so back down to the TH we went.
Descent: It was hot. We took our time, mostly coming down the way we came and taking a couple of long breaks. We got back to the cars at exactly 7:00 PM.
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