The Reality Bath re-Redux

2025 note: I had a strong feeling that "The Reality Bath" would be repeated this winter and had made a bet with myself about who would do it and how. I lost the bet but the feeling was correct; Balin Miller made the second ascent of the climb, 37 years after Randy Rackliff and I made the first ascent, and did it alone, without the rope. Style Matters.

There was a variation of the following essay on my old climbing website, which I recently took down. That broke a link from the Gripped website article about Balin's climb so I gave it a read and added some details without doing a full rewrite.

We were willing to play for more than we could lose.

I was willing to die for it.

True safety would have meant not being there at all. Hell, safety never entered into it when we finally pulled the trigger.

No one else has been willing or gone there since 1988. The route has not been repeated.

It is an incredibly dangerous route. Although not technically difficult by modern standards it was fairly hard for the era. The big issue was the objective danger and that the climber is exposed to it for 4-6 hours (in the era of our ascent).

We climbed six pitches, about halfway up on our first attempt. Two big icefall events happened while we were on the steepest section so the big, man-killing, car-smashing sized blocks missed us. But we heard them and felt the displaced air as they rushed past. We even saw some shadows go by in the spindrift.

Our courage evaporated. I don't know if it was safer to rappel and retreat or if we'd have been better off continuing up. I do know that we could not talk each other into going up. We were WAY over the line at that point. Back at the van we read a note left under the windshield by Geoff Creighton that read (and I have to paraphrase), "We saw the serac avalanche and thought you guys were dead. Come to our place in Banff tonight for a 'Beat The Reaper' celebration." And that's exactly what we did.

Conditions came good three weeks later after a long-ish warm spell followed by a hard refreeze. We did some warm-up routes early in the week: we simul-soloed "Polar Circus" on Monday, then "Slipstream" on Wednesday, where my speed record still stands, and finally we went back to the new route on the White Pyramid on Friday.

Sacking-up to go back up on that route was one of the biggest reference points in my climbing career. Every step closer my feet got heavier. Drive was tested, and courage examined. We focused on the smallest bits of positive feedback: the hard-frozen snow, the craters below the face, which we took to indicate that all of the ice that could cut loose from the face of the serac threatening the route had already done so. I thought it must be like Dresden as we threaded our way through the wasteland of debris. By the time we reached the base of the face, and all had been quiet during the approach, I was transformed. Ready. Willing.

The ice cliff jeopardizing the waterfall is immense, 30-40 meters high all the way across the face. It looked far more dangerous than "Slipstream" but to us, not unreasonable. "Today", intuition said, "is a good day to risk everything."

We soloed the first five pitches, retrieving our rappel anchors on the way. Two pitches of grade 3, two of grade 4 and one of 5 disappeared beneath our feet in just over an hour. We were in overdrive as soon as our crampons touched the ice and did not stop until we reached the safety of the cave below the sixth pitch. It was just 9:30 a.m., plenty of time to freak out over what might come next. Randy lead the 15-meter free-standing pillar this time. It was fractured across the base so he was very gentle with it. After clipping the two screws I'd placed almost a month before, he ran out the rope on thin plates and overhanging mushrooms to a hanging belay. It was one of the toughest pitches either of us had ever done. I lead through on brittle grade 5 ice. At the top of the seventh pitch I saw the seracs clearly for the first time. The flat light of early morning, combined with foreshortened appearance from the basin had been deceiving. From my imperiled stance I scanned ahead; I saw the serac wall overhanging me by 8-10 meters. I saw the giant cornice and the fracture lines and exfoliating blocks frozen to the face of it all. It was easily ten times worse than I'd imagined.

The serac face directly above us was unclimbable so we traversed right towards what appeared to be an easier break. Randy led out on the aging ice. Every time one of his tools hit the ice the frozen-together blocks beneath my feet shuddered. I shuddered. I wanted to be anywhere but anchored beneath this capital sentence. At one point Randy pulled down a dinner setting for twelve without getting a solid placement; the ice was too old and compressed and brittle. He shouted, "this is really, really sick Mark". I thought it must have been real bad because he usually likes it that way. We retreated half a pitch and traversed further west under the ice cliff. I found a 15m high, left-facing corner through the rock bordering the ice and we both soloed through the spindrift toward the summit. I stood at the top, sweating little glass beads and relishing the first moment of the day when I didn't want to vomit. The sense of relief was incredible. We shook off the fear and shook hands, and gave each other a knowing look while we watched the sun go down.

We named it "The Reality Bath", 2000 feet, 11 pitches, and gave it a grade of VII because of its length, sustained difficulty and insane objective hazard. And at the time I wrote, maybe it'll be repeated, gang-soloed, down-rated, dismissed. So what? I respect action and competence. Words and numbers are meaningless to the artist. The number VII simplifies conversation. It offers a notion of what to expect. Note: the single-numeral rating system used in Canada at that time combined engagement or overall seriousness with technical difficulty so we believed the VII was justified.

On the way down we rationalized the risk and hooted with relief. I shouted my thesis, "Today's new climbs are yesterday's death routes". But Randy didn't answer so I just sang an old New Model Army song to myself as we post-holed through the snow.

A while later Steve De Maio, who did his fair share of hard routes up there and wrote a fine book titled, "The Rage: Reflections on Risk", described his impression of modern alpine routes in the Canadian Rockies, "You put a bullet in the chamber and spin it. Place the barrel against the roof of your mouth and pull the trigger five times as fast as you can." I did not disagree agree, and on "The Reality Bath" the hammer fell with five immensely satisfying clicks.

Some years after our ascent a new guidebook came out wherein the grading system was separated into a technical rating and a seriousness rating; under the new system "The Reality Bath" received a technical grade of 6+ (Balin suggested 5+ or 6- after his repeat) and an engagement Grade 7, which according to the guidebook's author Joe Josephson, means, "you have a 50-50 chance of getting the chop."

I closed out the Author's Note about "The Reality Bath" in "Kiss or Kill" by writing, "What remains to be seen is the judgement of whoever has the balls to go up and make the second ascent of this remarkable route. We climbed it, we lived, we remember it well." And now that Balin Miller has repeated the route I will sit down with him to record a podcast and see what he has to say.