The Art of Bailing

CONTENT WARNING: This article involves discussions of death in the mountains. Skip section 1 to avoid the heaviest discussion of the subject.

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§1 | INTRODUCTION

People often describe certain skills as an art. In this sense, there is an art to cooking, public speaking, or climbing an offwidth. It means that there is no strict set of rules that one can follow to master the skill; there is an element of style or judgment, often peculiar to the individual, that manifests in their practice of the skill. You usually know when you see someone performing well (or poorly), but it may be difficult to figure out the “essence” of the art for the purpose of teaching others. Despite this, I want to discuss how we might all become better at one particular art that I spend a regrettably large amount of my time contemplating: the art of bailing.

The art of bailing is unlike most other arts. Successfully practicing it requires frustrating your other goals. It requires technical know-how. Control over your emotions is a must. It is an art that is practiced when threatened with danger. Most importantly, it is an art that you must strive to master if you want to travel safely in the mountains. This is because staying safe in the mountains requires more than being able to recognize danger. As a practical matter, managing risk requires you to come to terms with your motivations for being in the mountains, and to interrogate the philosophy and psychology that determines when you turn around because of danger (or push on despite it).

This article is an attempt to explain my perspective on bailing. I start in Section 2 by explaining a particular framework for viewing mountain sports that places bailing in a role of significance. Specifically, I argue that we ought to view mountain sports as games, and that there is a game-within-the-game (the “bailing game”) that plays a key role in determining what counts as a success when we embark on trips designed to “achieve” in the mountains. I then discuss (in Section 3) how to improve at deciding when to bail. Giving good general-purpose advice on when to bail is nearly impossible, so the scope of this part of the project is limited. In Section 4, I talk briefly about bailing techniques and argue in favour of habitually spending more time learning to bail safely. Getting good at climbing is one thing; getting good at descending is another (and more important) thing entirely.

I do not think that mastering the art of bailing is itself enough to stay safe in the mountains; injury can occur by failing to perform in circumstances where bailing is otherwise unnecessary (e.g. if you fall on a pitch that ought to be within your level of comfort). Improving strength, technique, and mountain knowledge is also necessary to ensure that fewer circumstances warrant bailing. But short of staying inside and never venturing out into the mountains, your next best defence against disaster is knowing when to call it quits.

The VOC is famous for somewhat dangerous shenanigans. I personally contribute to this culture, as can be seen in the shockingly large number of epics I have written about in other trip reports. But I credit this to my unusual willingness to suffer my way up a climb and my propensity to select climbs that lend themselves to unusual difficulties; I spend a great deal of time evaluating whether or not I am facing the sort of difficulty that warrants turning back. People who have climbed with me can attest that I love a good bail. For every two climbs I complete, I bail on at least one other. In discussing the art of bailing, I hope to offset any of my unintended glorification of risk with a level-headed discussion of decision-making in the mountains.

This topic matters to me. The list of VOCers who have died in the mountains is larger than it should be. Several of my own climbing partners (or my climbing partners’ partners) have died in the mountains. Danger is more than a word. Actions have consequences. No one is immortal. I would say that this is not a game, but that would not be true. Our game is a version of Russian Roulette that offers just enough control over the probabilities for us to ignore the click of the trigger. The main difference is that, unlike Russian Roulette, it is not only the suicidal who are rationally permitted to play; mountain sports offer far greater upside, and hold the potential to involve far less risk.

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§2 | CLIMBING (AND BAILING) AS A GAME

When we venture into the mountains, we do so to play a particular kind of game. The game may lack an opponent and a paper rulebook, but these are not the features we should care about. What matters is that we are engaging in a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Drawing on Bernard Suits’ definition of a game (from Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia), we can identify four key concepts that are necessary for a game:

A game involves actions that conform to [1] constitutive rules (the rules that limit what behaviours count as playing the game, thereby creating obstacles for the player), performed in order to achieve a [2] prelusory goal (a specific achievable state of affairs that a player is trying to bring about, which is separate from the rules of the game). You can contrast the prelusory goal with the lusory goal, which hardly varies across games: it is the goal of winning the game. While you can technically achieve the prelusory goal without following the rules, you will not have achieved the lusory goal. For example, you can top out a boulder problem (the prelusory goal) using a ladder (which is forbidden by the constitutive rules), but you would not have “sent” the boulder. We are therefore restricted in the means we can deploy. We call the permitted methods of pursuing the prelusory goal the [3] lusory means.

We may pursue the lusory goal for yet further goals (e.g. to have fun, win money, achieve status, etc). But none of these are essential to the nature of the game itself.In order to play, the player must adopt the [4] lusory attitude: a willingness to accept the obstacles created by the rules. Rejecting the lusory attitude might help you achieve the state of affairs that defines the prelusory goal, but it might come at the expense of the value of the game as a whole. Bouldering with ladders would make for a rather dull sport.

Different mountain sports involve various prelusory goals. Mountaineers take reaching the summit as their goal, and sport climbers aim to reach the top of a route and clip the chains. Not all means of achieving these goals are permitted. Landing on the summit with a helicopter or pulling on draws is against each sport’s constitutive rules. Sometimes, there is ambiguity in the rules. This is where we find debates about “ethics” in climbing; often these debates are not about “ethics” qua moral philosophy, but are instead about aesthetic considerations, or arbitrary rules that serve to unify the sport into a well-defined practice that produces more value than if the rule (despite its arbitrariness) had not existed. Adopting the lusory attitude requires us to care about these rules, even if they are arbitrary or contrived. The sport climber who always pulls on draws will likely get less value out of their “sport” (if it even makes sense to call it that) than someone who constrains themselves, just as the basketball player who deploys a ladder likely will not get the full benefits of the game. Remember, the prelusory goal itself is somewhat silly. Who cares about a ball going into a basket, or standing at a local highpoint on the globe? These states of affairs themselves hold relatively little value. But adopting them as goals while voluntarily constraining oneself with constitutive rules seems to produce a tremendous amount of value.

Winning a game requires playing by the constitutive rules; failing to follow the rules is to fail to play, and one must play in order to win. If I claimed to win a marathon by driving to the finish line, you would point out that crossing the finish line is not itself enough to have competed and won. This is similar to, but distinct from, losing the game. Losing the game entails failing to achieve the lusory goal. With some games, it may be possible to win the game without achieving some prelusory goal. For example, imagine an elimination round at some tournament where the higher-seeded competitor going into the round wins by default. Both competitors then fail to “score” (e.g. achieve the game’s prelusory goal) and so they tie. The higher-seeded competitor would then succeed in achieving the lusory goal (winning) without having succeeded in achieving the prelusory goal (“scoring”).

My attitude towards bailing involves reframing the decision to bail as part of a game. I call it the bailing game. While this game has its own constitutive rules, it also plays a role within the constitutive rules of the mountain sports I play. It is therefore a game within a game. Specifically, it places limits on our lusory means, thereby restricting when achieving the prelusory goal of mountain sports (e.g. standing on the summit) will “count” as playing the game. The rule is simple: if you lose the bailing game (or refuse to play), you cannot achieve the lusory goal of your mountain sport either. Put simply: your send only counts if you also win the bailing game.

What does it take to win the bailing game? You need to either [a] achieve the prelusory goal of bailing, or [b] complete your mountain objective in the absence of circumstances that warrant a bail (I will provide a rough analysis of what “warrant” means in the next section). Put differently, continuing when you should not means losing the game. Bailing always means winning.

Under this mentality, you cannot win game 1 (your mountain sport) without being in a state of affairs where you have also won game 2. Getting to the summit by luck, in spite of risks that should have motivated you to bail, means losing game 2 (the bailing game), and by extension game 1. This is because winning game 2 is a prerequisite for winning game 1. Remember: the rules of game 1 allow victory only when you complete your goal without ignoring circumstances that warrant a bail. Again, put simply: your send doesn’t count if you should have bailed but failed to do so. To the player of these two games, there is a preference hierarchy of outcomes:

• The best case involves winning both games and completing your goal.
• The next best case involves bailing when bailing is warranted, as you win game 2 without foregoing an opportunity to win game 1 (as persisting in dangerous conditions cannot possibly result in winning game 1 per the rules of the game, even if technically achieve the prelusory goal).
• The third-best scenario involves bailing when it is not strictly required. Remember: bailing is always a win, so can and should feel proud of winning game 2 whenever you bail.
• The fourth-best scenario involves winning neither game. You’ll note that this scenario happens both when you bail too late (and thus have failed to bail when circumstances warranted it, despite eventually bailing) and also when you complete your goal when you ought to have bailed.
• The absolute worst-case scenario involves losing both games, as when you die or become injured; not only do you lose this game, but you lose the rest of the value you might have found in life (dead people play no games).

Intuitively, this is the ranking that we ought to have in the mountains if we want to live a long life. We are allowed to feel proud and satisfied even when we do not “succeed” so long as we make good decisions, and we are not allowed to feel proud even when we “succeed” if we have made bad decisions.

The bailing game is easy to understand but difficult to internalize. Understanding that bailing is always winning is easy to say but hard to feel. Adopting this mentality is, in my view, critical to sustainable mountain sports. You need to care about the bailing game, and by extension, winning it. It must change the way you view your objective game. Merely providing a description of the bailing game is probably not enough to do the work of making you truly care about it. Instead, I hope to persuade you to care with a comparison to Russian Roulette.

When I ask people about why they take on risk in the mountains, they often justify undertaking lethal risk with a cost-benefit analysis. They tell me that the rewards outweigh the risks. But when I ask those same people if there is a sum of money that would motivate them to play a round of Russian Roulette, many say no. At first glance, this might seem somewhat strange. If all we cared about in the mountains was reducible to a question of risk and reward, then there is no category-difference between stepping onto a possible avalanche slope and pulling the trigger in Russian Roulette. The risks might be different (a fraction of a percent versus 1-in-6 odds of death) and the payoffs might differ (money versus bliss), but the core of the gamble is the same. Your life is staked against reward.

The problem with Russian Roulette is that the game is played by wholly accepting risk; your life is staked on fixed odds. Mountain sports, by necessity, involve accepting some degree of risk. You can never reduce your odds of death or injury to zero. But to play responsibly means being responsive to the risk and therefore to fight against it. While this does not require us to give up mountain sports entirely, it does require us to integrate into the process a way of raging against the danger: something fundamental to the game that asks us to do more than tacitly accept the danger. Put differently, it is not necessary to flee risk. But it is necessary to take up the fight against it as a core objective. The bailing game integrates the fight against risk into the fundamental rules of the game at the same time that it authorizes a degree of risk. In so doing, it balances the necessity of experiencing risk with an active engagement in risk mitigation. The exercise of agency involved in the bailing game is what can set mountain sports apart from Russian Roulette.

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§3 | WHEN SHOULD I BAIL?

The core of the bailing game is bailing whenever circumstances warrant it. This is, unfortunately, the conceptual crux of the issue. What warrants a bail?

The problem with trying to create a “rulebook for bailing” is that there are nearly infinitely many factors that together constitute your circumstances in the mountains. Obvious variables include weather, route conditions, fatigue, the difficulty of the terrain ahead, supplies (e.g. food and water), and your proximity to rescue. Less obvious ones include your knowledge of the route, the likelihood that you are overestimating your own abilities, the present difficulty of retreat relative to the future difficulty of retreat, and the current and likely future social dynamics between you and your partner. We can also analyze these variables at different levels of abstraction. Weather is made of many sub-variables, like sunlight, cloud cover, ambient air temperatures, changes in temperature over a period of time, precipitation, wind, and so on. Some will be relevant in certain circumstances, and others will not.

To make matters worse, these variables interact in ways that produce emergent effects; you cannot simply tally the number of “bad” variables and bail when a threshold is met. Fatigue, loose rock, and a large volume of terrain is a recipe for taking a fall; the three together are much worse than the sum of their individual parts. These interactions are complicated and idiosyncratic; you cannot understand the effects of one variable without an eye to many of the others. Evaluating when to bail is an art and not a science.

The first step towards mastering the “art of bailing” is mastering the art of evaluating risk factors and understanding the circumstances you find yourself in. But this is not enough. Once you understand the nature of the risk you find yourself in, you need to understand how it measures up against your personal risk tolerance. Unfortunately, risk tolerance is poorly understood in the mountain sports community.

One misunderstanding I often hear is that risk tolerance is “subjective” and “up to the individual to determine.” In one sense, this is true; individuals are rationally permitted different levels of risk tolerance (e.g. parents ought to tolerate less risk, given their moral obligations to their children) so in a way it is “subjective” in the sense that it varies depending on the subject.

The individual is also best situated to evaluate the facts that determine what their risk tolerance ought to be. I am not privy to enough details in your life to make the evaluation for you, so as a practical matter each person must determine it for themselves. But it does not follow that every person’s risk tolerance (qua psychological state) is appropriate; if a new parent decided that free soloing a 5.14 was an acceptable risk, you could rightly declare them as misguided.

Risk tolerance is instead a dynamic evaluation of costs and benefits that takes into account uncertainty. You are not allowed to turn a blind eye to risks; when you suspect that a risk might exist yet decline to learn more, you are eschewing a sort of responsibility. The proper level of risk that you might tolerate is determined with reference to the costs and benefits of the circumstances, qualified by your responsibility to learn more and your best evaluation of the factors that introduce uncertainty into your evaluation of both upside and downside risk. Again, the variables here are numerous. Figuring out the appropriate level of risk for any given objective at any particular moment in your life is an art and not a science.

At this point, I could attempt to provide a conceptual model of what warrants a bail that merges an analysis of risk with an analysis of rational risk tolerance. This probably will not be practically useful. I could also try to give “directional” advice (e.g. “bail more!”). This is the conservative thing to do. Bailing more means more safety, right? But that would undermine the point of this article, which is that we can responsibly engage in risk-taking behaviour. We all accept risk, and for many, growing in mountain sports involves actively breaking free from an overly risk-averse attitude and mastering their fears.

At this point, it is tempting to either despair or dismiss my entire framework. If we cannot write a rulebook for bailing, and I cannot didactically explain when to bail, then is the bailing game nothing more than “vibes”? In other words, if no independent referee can ever tell you whether you won or lost the bailing game, what is the point of playing?

That something is difficult to measure or articulate, or that a threshold appears fuzzy, does not mean that it isn’t meaningful, or that we should not try to evaluate it. It is difficult to quantify the impact of how choosing to spend a weekend skiing with friends will help or hurt your future happiness (it might make you happy and relaxed, or it might make you fall behind catastrophically in your studies); that does not mean that we cannot make the choice, or give up trying to determine if it is a good idea. That it is hard to know also does not entail that there is no right answer. That humans are fallible is no reason to give up trying; just as people are better and worse at managing their time (despite no one being perfect), people can be better or worse at tailoring their risk assessments to their personal risk tolerances.

The way to improve—now that you have a conceptual framework for understanding what it is that you’re trying to improve—is the same as for any other “fuzzy” or abstract skill. Humans often learn best through stories and experiences, so expose yourself to as much discussion of risk and risk tolerance as you possibly can. While there are many ways to do this, I would suggest pursuing three in particular: mentorship, mileage (in the mountains), and media.

[1] Mentorship. By going into the mountains with people more experienced than you, you can pick up a great deal of know-how concerning hazards and decision-making. The art of noticing salient variables that increase risk and discussing how they interact to create your idiosyncratic circumstances for that day is easily developed through this kind of collaboration. Be warned, though: competence and aligned risk tolerance are not the same thing. Someone more experienced than you may have a higher or lower risk tolerance; do not assume that their risk tolerance is the “appropriate” one, and that you need to conform to their level of comfort.

If you do not have the opportunity to make it into the mountains with more experienced people regularly, talking to them outside of mountain contexts can help as well. Share your own stories, and listen to theirs. Deliberately move the conversation in the direction of risk assessment; pick their brains, and invite them to comment on your thought processes from past trips. There is an element of fear that often pops up here; we do not like to be judged for being imperfect, or for making bad decisions, and so many people tend to struggle to be open about their decision-making. Overcoming this fear of judgment is critically important. Internalize the notion that people respect and respond to critical thinkers who show honest interest in self-improvement and that this is often more than enough to offset judgment about past bad decisions. The greatest negative judgment is often towards those who persistently make the same mistakes, endangering themselves and others without trying to improve.

[2] Mileage. Put yourself onto objectives where there is a chance you might bail. Then, be conservative and trigger-happy on the bail decision. You will not improve your ability to evaluate risk if you never challenge yourself with some degree of risk. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. The trick is making sure that you err on the side of caution, and try to avoid sticking your neck into the proverbial guillotine by tackling a challenge with too many unknown-unknowns. Try to run your more ambitious plans by other people before you go to make sure you’re fully informed of the risks you might face. Some people don’t like to do this because they feel like they’re “spraying” about objectives they have yet to complete. I think that attitude is a bit silly; I find that discussing my future objectives helps me acquire beta and advice that I otherwise never would have found on my own.

[3] Media. Read articles & trip reports (in the VOCJ, CAJ, AAJ, online blogs, etc), watch YouTube videos or movies, and listen to podcasts. Hearing from many perspectives, especially those outside your immediate mountain subculture, will help you pick up on common themes and failure modes in risk assessment.

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§4 | BAILING SKILLS

Climbers often spend too much time focusing on learning the skills to ascend a wall, but rarely spend enough time learning to descend. There is a lot to learn; you can fill books with the techniques involved in bailing (I highly recommend Andy Kirkpatrick’s book Down). But while a large number of the key skills involve ropework/gear, many of the most crucial skills are psychological; lowering the emotional barriers that stop you from bailing is just as important as understanding how to safely rig a bail anchor. To drive home the importance of getting proficient at both “soft” and “hard” bailing skills, this section will highlight a few pieces of advice that emerge from my own experiences with bailing.

1) The Sharkfin | South Ridge [5.8X*]

(*I cannot find any beta on this route, nor did I personally complete it. This grade is my best guess from a visual assessment.) 

G2 (Glacier School) usually involves one day of instruction and one day of pursuing a glaciated objective. In September of 2023, we camped out at Brohm Ridge, so I elected to pursue the Sharkfin as our objective. Only one student (Sebastian Sotomayor) was keen to join me, so we set off on the second day as a lone pair. We reached the base of the ridge without incident but quickly discovered why there were no trip reports on the feature. The volcanic rock is genuinely terrible; the Sharkfin is for all purposes a large cairn composed of detached blocks delicately balanced atop one another. I soloed up one pitch with the rope, slung an assortment of larger blocks, and belayed my student up the pitch. The second pitch looked to be a 5.8 boulder problem on a cliff face ever so slightly overhanging the west side of the ridge. I decided that this was a wildly inappropriate objective for G2, so we made the decision to bail. I offered a belay to Sebastian, then disassembled the anchor and down-soloed the route.

Key lesson: Downclimbing is a key skill; you will not always be able to rappel off a reliable anchor, especially if you need to bail mid-pitch. Practice downclimbing in the gym. This will give you a better understanding of your own limits, and build the skills needed to downclimb harder grades safely. As a general rule, whenever I am on an “adventure climb” (e.g. a route with tricky route-finding or anchors of unknown quality), I will never climb a pitch that I cannot also downclimb.

2) Pac Man Couloir / Grand Daddy Couloir 

On December 29th, Evan Wong and I attempted a double-header couloir day up the Icefields Parkway in Alberta. We had been staying out of the Rampart Creek Hostel, and wanted to ski a few classic lines on our way back to Canmore at the end of our trip.  The obvious two were Pac Man Couloir off Bow Summit, and the Grand Daddy Couloir on Bow Peak. Conditions looked safe enough (moderate avalanche risk in the alpine, with no recent snow). Unfortunately, we found wind slab at the base of the couloir. We tried to evaluate if it was limited to an isolated terrain feature, but could not find any safe way around the touchy sections of the snowpack. The decision was obvious: bail.

Key Lesson: Set backup plans. Bailing is more tolerable when you can do so at a lower opportunity cost. 

After a quick drive to Mosquito Creek Hostel, we began skiing again. Grand Daddy went smoothly in comparison, though the snowpack was radically different than we had expected. There had been reports of a size 3 avalanche ripping through the couloir merely days prior. There was no evidence of such a slide; there was minimal debris covering the fan at the base, and the snowpack revealed layers that I would have expected to be “cleared out” by a slide of that size. This put us on edge. Whenever your field observations radically differ from your predictions (informed by the avalanche forecast, recent conditions reports, etc.) red flags should be going off. This is true even if conditions are better than predicted because it means that you were missing something going into the trip. If you do not know what you are missing, there may be other unknown hazards that have yet to reveal themselves.

Key Lesson: Keep the conversation about risk going even when things are looking good. Always compare your mental model of relevant risks to observed conditions. Do not grow complacent.

3) Cirrus Mountain | Polar Circus [WI5]

On January 3rd, 2025, my friend Anton Korsun was leading the first pitch of the upper section of Polar Circus. Despite temperatures below -15℃, liquid water flowed over the surface of the ice, freezing over everything it touched. We needed to bail. He made a V-Thread in the ice, but elected to leave tat (spare 6 mm cord brought specifically for this purpose) instead of threading the rope. If you put the rope through a V-Thread while liquid water flows on the route, it will permanently and irrecoverably freeze into the ice (at least until warmer weather thaws the route).  His party had made this mistake while descending off of Les Miserables [WI6+] a few weeks prior, and he was not about to make the same mistake again.

Key Lesson: Buy and bring tat on every climb where there’s a chance you need to bail without bolt anchors. I strongly recommend 6 mm sterling cord for summer climbing; it is lighter, stronger, and more supple than any other brand as of February 2025. 7 mm is overkill (in my view) but technically makes for stronger V-Threads given the extra surface area, so it may be worthwhile in winter. Do your research and make decisions based on your personal risk tolerance. I tend to buy cord in bulk when I find it on sale, and consider it a consumable expense like gas; I never feel guilty about leaving it behind. I try to clean up old tat whenever I can to make my environmental impact neutral. 

Once he rejoined me at the belay, we set off down the route. We decided to rappel the Pencil instead of walking around as we had when we climbed Polar Circus the previous year. This involved rappelling a short step of WI3, then rappelling from a tree down a long free-hanging rappel next to an anchor at the base of the pillar. Unfortunately, when Anton went to pull the ropes, they became irredeemably stuck. The ropes had twisted around each other; pulling one end of the rope only “cinched” the rope over the other strand, meaning the harder you pulled, the more resistance was offered.

Key Lesson: ensure that the ropes are “seated” parallel to one another against the rock as you rappel and that they do not twist over one another. It is really easy to let them get twisted as you take off your belay device; it is this moment in particular where you must exercise caution. 

Luckily, the Pencil could be bypassed to the right, and we did not need to solo a WI6 pillar to retrieve our ropes. After attaching the rope to the lower anchor, we walked up and around to where we had started rappelling. Anton down-soloed the WI3 step, then released the rope from the anchor and soloed back up the step. To protect the step without a rope, we chained together most of our quickdraws and spare tat; this way, he could clip his personal anchor into various points of this impromptu-mega-daisy-chain as he descended/ascended. Was it sketchy? Yes. Did it work? Better than free soloing without protection.

Key Lesson: You can use your gear in “off-label” ways. Think about how you can use gear in multiple ways; for example, Dyneema slings can be used as a prusik in a pinch. If you do not think about how to use your gear in strange ways outside of the mountains, it can be very difficult to improvise solutions for the first time when you are under pressure in an emergency situation. 

This was our last hiccup; the rest of the descent went smoothly. Before long, we were back relaxing in a hot tub in Canmore.

4) Husume Buttress | Turf’s Up [WI3+ M5*] / 29 Forever [WI3 M4*] 

*(don’t quote these grades; I remain uncertain of their accuracy.)

On January 25th, 2025, I had planned to attempt a route on Husume Buttress (Blackcomb) with Julian Larsen & Evan Wong. Our beta consisted of a single vague blog post and a 1996 CAJ article. Unfortunately, snow and ice conditions near Whistler were more grim than we had realized. After climbing a pitch of M3, we arrived at the actual start of the route; there was so little snow that the walk-up to the base of the climb was now a full pitch on its own.

We wanted to succeed on at least something (as we had been shut down on the North Face of Sky Pilot the previous weekend), so the plan was to bail if things looked too grim, then boot up the Husume Couloir and climb the connecting ridge to the top of Spearhead Peak. Unfortunately, our stoke for genuine mixed climbing was a bit too high. The normal route did not look like it was in, so I went questing up an alternative gulley further out to the right that I suspected might link back into the route higher up. It did not. After a bouldery section of M5, I had to climb ~10 metres of thin, unprotectable 80° névé up a corner to reach a horn that I could sling. The climbing was shockingly delicate; your feet needed to be placed perfectly to not blow, and the tools were more for balance than anything. After a nauseatingly long and cerebral lead, I finally reached the horn and placed a hex in a crack beside it.

What followed was a confused and uncertain conversation about whether or not we should bail. It was unclear if we could possibly go fast enough to succeed on our backup objective should we bail now. If we wanted to persist on climbing up the buttress, I could either push as far as possible up the corner I was currently in, or I could leave the corner and search for yet another alternative route up a snow ramp to the right. After much back-and-forth, we settled on the last option. I would bail off the corner, then try leading out to the right.

There was already bail tat on the horn, but it was placed awkwardly over the top of the horn. A more secure way of placing the tat would have been to weave it beneath a constriction on its back side, such that the tat could not possibly fall off. I replaced the tat with some of my own and descended.

Key Lesson: Don’t always trust existing tat. It might be placed sub-optimally or it may be damaged (by the sun or some kind of abrasion). I know someone who relied on pre-placed tat only to have it explode during their rappel, causing them to fall (luckily, they survived without injury). 

Unfortunately, my subsequent lead out to the right revealed nothing easier. Julian and Evan followed the pitch before we decided to call off the search for a viable line and descend. This involved downclimbing steep snow to another anchor (our upper anchor used 3 cams in a perfect crack, and we were not about to leave those behind). We used the lower anchor to do one rappel back to our skis. The last remnants of sunset vanished as we skied back to the car, and we left feeling somewhat disappointed that we had failed to bail early enough to succeed on our secondary objective.

Key Lesson: When you set backup plans, watch the clock and have cutoff times in mind going into your objective. 

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§5 | CONCLUSION 

Not every sub-topic in climbing needs to be discussed in detail. Many thousands of hours have been spent philosophizing about various non-issues in climbing; many people would benefit from thinking less and climbing more. Bailing is not one of those non-issues. It is important to think about the attitudes and skills involved in bail decisions. You need to foster a healthy attitude towards bailing and choose partners who both know when to bail and who are willing to operate at your desired level of risk tolerance. In short, you must learn to love the art of bailing or choose to pursue safer hobbies.