E-grades and Pads

Richie Patterson from Wild Country has answered some questions in relation to E-grades and crash pads.

(c) Rockfax

About the UK system
The UK system is very subtle and does confuse some people but the UK has also adopted - we use French grades for sports routes, and Font grades for bouldering, it's just for our trad routes we feel that the original system still works really well. A simple explanation is that there's one number for the protection/overall feel of the route (the objective danger) which is the E grade, and one grade for the hardest move, the numeric grade - and by reading these numbers you can know a lot about the route, so some examples of how to read the grade would be in the examples below.
The most common grade combination would be the route in bold - but there could be variations either side of this and although the E grade doesn't change, how it combines with the number grade lets you know what the route may entail:

E2 5a (F6a) US5.9RX - Reasonable climbing, with no hard moves, but probably very poor protection and maybe poor rock. Maybe on Gogarth or a maybe a short, friable sandstone route. The standard of climbing is lower than the possible danger.
E2 5C (F6b) - US 5.10b - Some technical climbing but mainly good protection. The technical standard of the climbing is very much 'in-line' with the objective danger.
E2 6B (F6c+) - US 5.10d? Very hard move but very good protection - probably a short route a one move wonder, - a bouldery short route with very good gear and one move much harder that the rest. The technical standard of the climbing is much higher than the danger involved.

Obviously this takes an amount of experience to understand but then so do other systems - and our grading system is a way of trying to understand the route more - and maybe a good way of transalting this would be to compare with sports climbing. So you can have for example a grade of 7c on two routes but the routes can be totally different - and until you have the crucial information (the route length) you cannot know what type of climb it will be. So for example if you see a route which is 7c and 8m you will know how it is compared to a route of 7c and 40m -  you know which will have harder moves, which will be pumpier etc etc

What about E-grades and Crash pads?
Obviously the routes are a little bit easier because of the use of pads and this is a difficult thing to quantify - for certain if Michele Caminati, see video, had fallen off 10 years ago from that point without pads he probably world have been very badly hurt. However, in the UK the grade for most 'routes' have been kept the same because to alter all the grades is not something which is easy to do - and this is why there are now many routes with both traditional E grades and 'highball' Font grades. People in general are happy with the UK system staying the same with pads and although James Pearson for example tried to make a distinction between pad and non pad ascents (and got many people upset who didn't understand what he was trying to do) this idea did not catch on.
And in fact my personal opinion is that there is a slow move to (if not downgrade) to recognise the ability of pads to save you in the grades of some routes and i think in a few years some of the grades will alter because of this. I think this will also happen with new routes as people choose to report stuff which is now 'safe' with pads as highball Font grades and not E grades.
Also when when you know the UK grading system the original grade still makes sense - for example on this route the fact it is E8 and not E9 tells you the hard climbing is lower down and not higher up the arete, and that even before pads, using 'spotters' (people to catch you) it may have been possible to fall.