19 April 2012

Ondra thoughts on the 8C+ grade

Christian Core doing Gioia, 8C (+) also pretty much a traverse.
Ethan Pringle on The Wheel of life in Grampians which initially was graded 8C+ and later 8B+ or 9a have been suggested.
The first 8C's were suggested more than 10 years ago but even with the great progress the only 8C+ boulder is your suggested upgrade of Gioia, if we exclude boulder routes and traverses etc. Why is there a lack of 8C+?

I mean it is obvious fact that grades have changed during the last 10 years on the very top of the bouldering game. What could be considered as a benchmark 8C 10 years ago, is rather an 8B+ today. What is the reason? 
 
Is it because that first ascenders in those days proposed a grade of 8C for problems, which seemed just a tiny bit harder than 8B+ they had done before and there wasn´t a sufficient gap between 8B+ and 8C? Hard to say, but important is to see the situation as it is now. 8C is pretty damn hard thing, according to present standards. Some problems sent 10 years ago got downgraded, and there is not so much mess any more.

Interestingly enough, there are some problems that even got upgraded - like Monkey Wedding from Fred Nicole in Rocklands, initially grade 8B+ in 2002, now it is considered as standard 8C. This proves that grades in bouldering are insanely subjective, as some Fred's boulders from the same era got harshly downgraded (Amandla - from 8C/C+ to soft 8B+). We can only do our best to make it as objective as possible, yo claim in  
a genuine way how hard we found the problems compared to others.

And that is what I did when I put up the FA of Terranova and made the second ascent of Gioia. They both seemed way harder (not only tiny bit) than any other 8C's I had done before, though I had not done lot of them. I decided
to go for 8C+ despite bearing in mind that 8C is damn hard thing nowadays.  
Because of this movement of 8C standard upwards, we haven't seen more  
8C+ been established recently, as there simply might not be harder  
problems than the 8C standard of nowadays.


Maybe one reason for the lacking of 8C+' is simple that the best climbers do not spend month working down projects like they did some 10 years ago? There are just so much to repeat before you start doing new FA's. I mean, as we have seen flashes of 8B+ and many fast 8C's we can estimate that the level has gone up.

Another reason might be that it is just so painful to do 5 - 10 moves 8C+ going straight up as the holds will be so small. Maybe it is just not so pleasent to do 8C+ or 9A boulders?

Yeah, it might be true that people aren't willing to project a boulder
problem for too long. But there were relatively fast ascents of 8C's already 10 years ago.

The hardest problems are surely way more friction-dependent than extreme  
routes, but even 8C has to be climbed in good conditions and one has  
neither power nor skin to give it more than a couple of tries a day.  
Surely, the hardest problems will always be question of friction and  
perfect skin, but already 8B+ or 8C's are very friction-dependent and  
painful, but as you don't have it on border your limits, you can do it  
despite not ideal temps or skin. In the 8C+ or 9A, It might be just  
really frustrating to try a problem for many days and not being able to  
do the moves, the worse to keep the spirit high as it hasn't been  
climbed yet and you are trying to find the best solution.
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