Roger Schaeli on overall grades for big walls

Roger Schaeli, one of the best and toughest big wall climbers out there, had a presentation at the Kalymnos Festival about his ground-up FA of Oddyssee on Eiger. He started the big project back in 2009 and it actually involved building a small house next to the big wall. After the slide show we had a discussion on how the media should explain the difficulty of the 1 400 metre long route beside saying that the hardest pitches were 8a+. In practice, he agreed that it could be possible to actually try and give overall grades for such routes in order to explain and present them to the media and climbers. As he has done 8cs pretty quick it might be more fair to compare Oddyssee with a 9a route. - The 8a+ grade might not be so impressive but the adventure grade is. We could gather a group of experienced big wall climbers and try to set up a way to explain an overall grade difficulty system. Another subject was ethics and how some guys actually used cheating stick when going for a big wall. - As long as you are honest about your style, everything is fine. But surely, it is not the same adventure to stick clip your way up instead of taking long falls.