I went up on very nice, 6"-deep, tightly-compacted snow over hardpack. It was step-kicking goodness. I followed a somewhat obvious line up and left-ish. And then the line trended out far left into a small boulder field, almost entirely snow-covered.

I suppose down deep I knew this was wrong. I had a pretty good idea that I was too far right, that I'd missed the approach to the apron of Horseshoe. But I was [stupidly, it turns out] pretty confident that if I kept following the line in front of me, which seemed to keep heading up and left, that I could intersect and drop into Horseshoe Gully proper. And hey, if I could avoid a wallow at its base, cool. I'd brought a harness and 60 meters of 7mm perlon to rap and/or bail, should the need arise. I was good. So I kept heading up.

Why am I so dumb? Why do I do dumb, dumb things? Do you know? Is it me?

I climbed up through a narrowing chute. I began to think thoughts. And then, just like that, like being escorted out the back door and being dumped in an alley after an Oprah interview that had gone so well, the trees choked in on the chute, and I was nowhere. Nowhere slow.

I was high enough in the gully-resembling-something-or-another that I knew that to descend was to call it a day. It was dawning on me that I was far more right on the face than I had previously thought. While conditions had been excellent early, it was getting later, the sun was coming on stronger, the snow was getting softer. There looked to be, when I could see it, much earlier, a lot of snow in Horseshoe Gully. The later the day, the more avalanche hazard. I had to decide what to do. I had come a long way. Going down would hurt.

I had watched an HBO Show called Legendary Nights a few days earlier. The show I saw was about the Gerry Cooney vs. Larry Holmes fight in 1982. You may or may not know the story. Cooney, an Irish-American, was regarded as another of the "Great White Hopes." The first since Rocky Marciano, I suppose. Anyway, he lost the fight. And they were interviewing him years later, and he'd said, of the later rounds, where he took a phenomenal beating, essentially, "I knew I was gonna lose. So I just wanted to show Larry that he couldn't hurt me."

Cooney hung in, got clobbered. But he didn't get hurt. Not physically, anyway.

I felt same. And it was two days before St. Patrick's. The Ides of March, actually.

I was going to hang in. I was going to go up. I was going to be stupidly dumb.

I grovelled through 3'-6' deep unconsolidated sugar snow, in heavy brush, for another 500'-800' vertical, on slope angles between 30 and 60 degrees. I wasn't concerned about avalanche in the trees, but I would not have wanted to do the same on an open slope. It was absolutely the worst hell on earth I've ever plowed. I am eternally grateful that Brian encouraged me to go do a solo trip. I am thankful that he was not there. Because, I tell you, each and every one of you, that section of earth would have been a Partnership Breaker.

I give it an 8.5 on the Suck-O-Meter, with 10 being the biggest blow possible.