The East Face of the Matterhorn towers over the Swiss village of Zermatt. Wind hammers the peak and strips snow from its craggy buttresses. From town, the sheer wall of rock and ice looks impossible to ski. But the forbidding slope was first skied by Toni Valeruz in May of 1975, and this year, snow and weather conditions aligned for a team of athletes, mostly women, to make an attempt on the face.

　　Nadine Wallner, 35, a fully-certified mountain guide and two-time Freeride World Tour champion from Klösterle, Austria, had her eye on the face while hosting a ski camp to train Red Bull athletes in Zermatt. She spied a brief window between storms to climb and ski the East Face on May 26 and seized the opportunity.

　　“It’s really unlikely to find decent conditions to ski the Matterhorn safely,” said Wallner, “the East Face is usually full of rock bands and it’s rare that it filled in so well.

　　Wallner, accompanied by Swiss mountain guide Ramona Volken and her friend Valentin Zufferey as well as another Freeride World Tour champion, Italian-born Arianna Tricomi, began climbing to the Hörnli Hut on May 25 to stage their descent. As they ascended toward the snow, thick clouds enveloped the “Hore” (the local, Valaisian name for the peak). The clouds concerned Wallner and her team—overcast skies act like insulation and keep the snow from refreezing, which can create wet and unstable surface conditions. The skiers were relying on a shallow refreeze to keep the snow in decent skiing condition and protect it from the hot May temperatures

　　The Matterhorns East Face was socked in with clouds. The skiers feared the clouds would prevent the May snow from refreezing. But the clouds cleared as the team of skiers ascended the eastern flank of the Matterhorn, allowing for just enough of a superficial refreeze that they felt comfortable continuing. “We booted up the face with crampons and two axes,” Wallner said. “We were just in the bubble of the dark. When the sun rose we reached the Solvay Hut.”

　　The Solvay Hut, an emergency shelter built high on the Matterhorn’s northeast ridge, is the high point for most parties who ski the East Face, including Wallners team. At 13,133 feet, it sits about 1,500 feet shy of the summit. But above the hut, near vertical rock walls guard the mountain’s peak. Parties who ski the East Face begin their descent from the hut, or, in exceptional snow years, 150 feet above it. Snow never really sticks to the rock above that.

　　By my count, and I don’t read German, the Matterhorn has only been skied from the summit twice. Swiss mountaineer André Dédé Anzévui made the first descent of the North Face of the Matterhorn from the summit in 1989. Then, in 2018, Italian Edmond Joyeusaz skied from the summit at the age of 60. Both skiers had to remove their skis and rappel from 800 feet below the summit past a rock band and then wrap around to the East Face to ski from the Solvay Hut.

　　The East Face, while still imposing, still only gets skied once every few years and is an extremely difficult objective. Wallner said she enjoyed easy travel on the uphill, but encountered tricky snow conditions on the descent. A recent storm system blew patches of new snow atop the stable spring snow they had hoped to ski. Those patches warmed quickly in the May sunlight and created dangerous sluff. Wallner had to ski carefully to link the patches of spring corn and avoid the hot, sticky newer snow. “It was quite sketchy at some points,” she said. “You had to really watch out where you skied because those powder patches got really hot and would slide. They can definitely catch your skis.”

　　When asked about the steepness, Wallner parried that it all comes down to the snow quality. “If the snow is good, very steep skiing can feel not so steep. And the opposite can be true too. Bad snow makes easy skiing feel very steep and scary.” Luckily for Wallner, route finding was the least of her worries. The team was able to follow their bootpack all the way down the East Face.

　　The team skied the face in conditions that could generously be described as subpar. I asked Wallner if she questioned any of her decision-making with the power of hindsight. “I wish we’d descended a half-an-hour earlier,” Wallner told me. “There were spin drifts from above turning into little stuff slides. When we got back to the [Hörnli] hut some larger avalanches came down from above.”

　　Tricky conditions on the Matterhorn took the life of an Italian skier just a week later on June 4. Luca Berini, a 34-year-old Italian ski instructor slipped and fell over 1,000 feet to his death while skiing the East Face in poor snow.

　　“I didn’t know him, but it’s so tragic,” said Wallner of Berini’s fall. “It makes it hard to even appreciate your own descent.”

　　But even in mid-June Wallner hasn’t given up skiing. The Austrian told me she’s still seeking out little windows of clear weather amid summer storms that are still dropping snow in the Swiss Alps. “Even if the window is 50/50, if you don’t go you’ll never know,” she said.