Curly Phillips first made a name for himself in the summer of 1909, when he chanced to meet the Rev. George Kinney, alone and struggling with packhorses loaded for an expedition in the waters of the Athabasca River near John Moberly's cabin (East of present-day Jasper) and immediately convinced him to accompany him on an ill-prepared adventure to attempt a third trip on his quest for the first ascent of Mount Robson. Kinney describes him as A sturdy youth of twenty-five, wearing on his Stetson the silver badge of the Guides Association of Ontario... A very prince of the trail. Quick, handy, a splendid cook, he made a camp-mate that could not be excelled... and though he had never climbed mountains before that summer, he proved to be a cool-headed and cautious climber. The two proceeded to spend over a month in camp making four large climbs up the northwest side of Robson, the final of which they claimed to have stood on the summit, though this was discredited by the Alpine Club of Canada due to lack of evidence and the unlikely nature of the route and the unsanctioned expedition. Alpine Club founding member and writer Elizabeth Parker would later claim that Phillips admitted in 1913 that they had been stumped by a final dome of ice at the summit that they could not surmount, though he himself, a dedicated diarist, had not written of this climb and never wrote or spoke definitively against it.