Halloween on Matterhorn Peak

It's fun to track your own whereabouts, year by year, by remembering where you were for a certain holiday.

Last year on Halloween I was walking the strip in Vegas with 4 French friends visiting from the Alps. Dave and I had taken them on a climbing road trip to Red Rock Canyon, a stellar climbing area 20 minutes north of the city.

The year before that, I was dressed up as a 1980s sport climber in my house in San Diego, with many of my closest friends nearby.

And the year before that, I was sitting in a bar in Grenoble, France, my own home in the Alps. It's amazing how much your life can change in a year. Or two. Or three. And then seem to come full circle.

This year, I was cozy in a tent beneath the moonlit profile of Matterhorn Peak. In the mountains again.

With Dave's van in wait of a new engine, we've been sharing my truck, which makes logistics a little tricky at times. So rather than driving circles around the mountains, I decided to join him on an intro to mountaineering course he was giving up on Matterhorn Peak. For me, it would be a good way to scope the route for when I may be guiding it this winter.

We met Dave's client, Matthew, at the Westin in Mammoth Lakes the night before the course was set to begin. We whisked him off to Tamarack Lodge for dinner -- hands down the best restaurant I have ever known in my life (run by a French chef, bien sûr!). We discussed some of Matt's goals for the trip, and decided to do a day of rock climbing skills the first day, then head up Matterhorn Peak the next two.

October had been a weird month for the Sierra Nevada. Early in the month, we had one decent-sized snow storm (enough that Mammoth Mountain opened for a few days!), followed by warm weather (Mammoth Mountain closed), and then another storm that dumped 4 feet of snow in the high country.

The result: crusty newer snow over a layer of bulletproff, ice-like snow. The type of snow you need crampons in to avoid slipping and sliding, but the moment you put them on, they get clogged with the soft snow on top. Walking is therefore punctuated by the soothing ting ting of ice axes whacking crampons. Lovely.

To make it worse, the snow was only knee to waist deep, making it treacherous to navigate around talus (a field of large boulders), as one would frequently posthole into trapped airspaces around the boulders. Ideal.

So we dropped the thought of even attempting the summit, found an acceptable snow slope, and got in a bunch of cramponing and footwork techniques, as well as self-arrest practice. Beautiful weather made for a highly enjoyable day, despite being foiled by the conditions.

At lunch, in an attempt to reclaim the feeling of glory associated with bagging a peak, and make the most of the marginal snow conditions, we staged a snowball-rolling war. Step one: form snowball. Step two: toss snowball up slope. Step three: hope that as it rolls downhill, it will pile on more snow. The winner is the one with the biggest snowball when it rolls to a stop.

Matt not only mastered footwork and self-arrest techniques in lightning speed, he also mastered the art of snowball rolling, and currently holds the title of Cinnamon Roll Snowball Master of the Matterhorn Peak Snowball-Rolling Championships.