Kalymnos: from soft to hard grades

Kalymnos is well-known for its soft grades but in reality in 2017 the new gym climbing generation will probably say the grades are hard. The reason for this is that almost half of the first steep routes have been downgraded, some lines are a bit polished and there has been a change in the climber profile and average strength. Some ten years ago, gyms were limited especially when it comes to Bouldering. Nowadays, new Boulder gyms are popping up everywhere and more and more climbers are performance oriented, following training programs. In Kalymnos, the unique and classical routes are long, 3-dimensional, with focus on resting and technique, which makes them almost the anti-style of Bouldering. After one attempt on the classical Aegialis 7c, (c) Jörg Zeidelhack, most need an hour's rest and can do a maximum of three attempts per day. This can be compared with the Bouldering lifestyle where you could do 30 attempts a day and instead of just ticking Aegialis, you could do at least five 7Bs. Amazingly, during the last month, Aegialis has been ticked only five times, which is just half of the average ascent number of the last ten years. At the same time, more lines of around the 7B grade are added to the 8a database. As the difficulty scale in climbing is supposed to reflect how hard the community has to struggle for doing different routes, it is time to stop saying that the typical routes are soft in Kalymnos and start to regard them as rather hard.