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Open forum

Rethinking grades...a semiserious effort of stating the obvious

So we had Jens getting everyone mad with his grades ideas, we have a few people all over the world copying the 8a.nu database concept on regional scale to implement "statistical grade" experiments, and so on. But : what is a grade? To me, it is a synthetic indication of difficulty. (obvious) Then : what is the difficulty of a route? Again in my opinion, the difficulty of a route is not something inherent to the piece of rock we climb. That same piece of rock might be very well an easy but very long walk for spiders. And absolutely impossible for elephants. So, difficulty must be something about the climbers, not about the rock. And, the most basic definition I can think of is : something is harder than another climb if less people on the planet have the necessary ability to do it. So, we have this difficulty that is easy to define and that ranks our routes from something that barely deserves the name "climb" to some hard still unclimbed project that might be sent one day, but we are not sure if it will happen and when. First problem : how do you translate this into a grade? My response : by a purely arbitrary choice. You cut the ranking into some classes and attach them the name of "grade". Willing to be elegant one could do this with mathematical or statistical criteria so that there is a fixed rule that defines the next grade (Ie making sure that there is a constant increment of difficulty) but it is still an arbitrary choice. Second problem : what about those new routes just climbed? Response : we have to rely on the experience and feelings of the FA, that will propose a prediction of what will happen to the route in the next few years really. Will no one be able to repeat it soon, even strong climbers with amazing effort and motivation? Then it deserves a very cutting edge grade, possibly the proposal of a new step in the scale. Even two steps if he/she thinks that they will take, let's say, over 10 years of repeated teamed attempts to do it, despite the sport will keep evolving and the average level will raise But everyone knows that for many reasons he/she might not be sincere, and above all, might make a false prediction even if totally honest. Subjective experiences have a fuzzyness that's lost in big numbers, and the definition of difficulty we gave is all in big numbers. So why did I write this shit? I see people commenting on two fresh routes announced 9b (="they will stay there for some years") as if the grade could be found with a chemical analysis of the stone the two climbs are made of. "One is harder than the other, one migh even be more than 9b but the FA kept low profile in the grade proposition" Ironically there are fewer comments on lines staying unrepeated for years or decades, where actually an objective element to judge difficulty is there : if they were as easy as the grade X they would have already been done, since any route of grade X falls after the same amount of assaults by that number of climbers over that time Also, two weird consequencesof defining difficulty the way I did : a)Grades are not immutable over time. They are valid only for a certain "climbing generation", let's say 10 or 20 years. As soon as revolutionary materials and training techniques are invented, and climbing trends happen, some kind of routes would inevitably become easier for the "homo climber" species, so they would deserve a downgrade (and viceversa, lost knowledge should result in upgrading some styles) b)Since the above point "a", good candidates for personal hardest and world hardest routes are unlikely to be in a popular fashionable style, unless there is really no other climbing style where you stand from the crowd as much. Paradoxically, those same routes that are "easy" for a generation will probably stay as testpieces in the next. In the early late 70's, hiding in your garage to do pullups and then climbing a 30-meter steep endurance line would have been a good shortcut for a brilliant world hardest. The same line now would look nice, visionary for the time, but much easier than the slabs the other climbers where doing. ok thats more than enough :)