After a big day skiing Bloody Couloir yesterday the plan was to go for Matterhorn Peak, an even bigger day. But as always, the scale of the Eastern Sierra brought us back down to earth.

In the early morning we stayed glued in our beds until the worsening forecast finally gave us an out -- Winter Was Coming. 28 degrees, snow and strong winds at higher elevations. Matterhorn was definitely out of the picture. But with none of us wanting to outright bail, we soon found ourselves sitting in the car at the Virginia Lakes parking lot, in a snowstorm, no one wanting to get out. We studied the multitude of aesthetic lines from the car until finally we built up enough enthusiasm to get out there. We knew it was going to be frozen hardpack, but it was beyond that, the snow was marble-ized; it was leave-no-trace skiing. We skinned for a futile couple hundred vert until switching off to crampons the rest of the way.

One of us (uhh, maybe me) voted for throwing in the towel, the snow conditions were so abysmal. But I was overruled and we kept climbing. Later, when Hinny began laughing and itching to turn around, Cooney strongly pushed for "30 more minutes". Gale-force winds (whatever that means) pummeled us with groppel the whole way up. We French-stepped to counter the wind blasts and soon Hinny had taken off, surging way above in a kind of fury, reminiscent of the late Ueli Steck's ascent of the Eiger video.

We contoured out of the Red Lake Bowl and onto a false summit on the Black Mountain summit ridge. But the true summit lay right behind, so we went for it. We summited in spite of ourselves.

The ski down was the worst conditions I've ever experienced... each turn was louder than a snowboarder and the chatter turned our brains to mush. We picked our way down and it sucked down to the last turn. But in spite of all that, it was a great day out exploring a new section of the Eastern Sierra. We'll definitely be back... but not in June.