UKC

While surfing some climbing sites the other day I came across a statement that had my eyes on stalks. In an article by John Arran about styles of ascents he mentioned "Fawcett’s Strawberries on Tremadog (now E7)". The key word here is "now" because for most of its life Strawberries has never been considered E7. ( http://www.planetfear.com/article_detail.asp?a_id=926 ) For a long time it was given E6 6b which was what the consensus among all climbers who had done it was.

So why has this historic route suddenly been upgraded? It maybe that some crucial holds have come off and it really has got much harder in which case you can ignore this post and I'll shut up. But that seems pretty unlikely as most of the holds are part of the crack system that forms the route.

Stefan Glowacz who made the first flash of the route said it was french 7b which equates to a hard E5 sport route. The protection on Strawberries is good but since it does take more effort to place than if it was bolted giving it an extra E grade (E6) for effort seems fair enough.

So why oh why is it now given E7 ? I asked a friend who lives in North Wales. He said:

It seems to me that people are simlpy upping grades to keep in line with some of the astronomical claims made by people who have sponsors to keep happy. ie. now you have loads of E9's then old E6's must really be E7...

This is interesting because lower grade routes at Tremadog mostly seem have the same grades they had 25 years ago. No sponsors to keep happy at E2 or E3 I guess.

The problem with retrograding a classic route like Strawberries though it really is a major rewrite of climbing's history. Up until now Ben Moon's 1984 route "Statement of Youth" was always considered Britain's first E7. But if Strawberries is E7 then we reached the E7 grade some 4 years earlier.

In reality however there is simply no comparison between these two routes. Moon's route is stacks harder than Strawberries. In french grading it is a full 4 grades harder: 7b vesus 8a. Yes you have to place nuts on Strawberries but given the route is safe, barely overhanging, and these are relatively straightforward to place this extra effort can, in no way, be equivalent to 4 french grades.

In reply to stp:

What on earth are you on about?

Strawberries was given E7 in the previous Tremadog guide, no idea what it is in the current starless one but it had the E7 grade for quite a while.

Statement of Youth is a sport route given F8a.

Yet another non-starter.

In reply to stp:

Upgrades of established accepted grade standard classics is bad. Trouble is someone needs to define those classics. If routes have got harder due to polish or damage its fair enough they get upgraded. The system needs to be logically consistent: I despair when grades accepted by editors for decades counter logic ie: the easier graded route is harder than another with the same style and same protection.

In reply to stp:


Ref the first E7: I think you'll find that Ron did another E7 in 1979, Desperate Dan at Ilkley.

In reply to stp:

Can't comment too much on Strawberries but certainly the people I know who've done it say E7 and somewhere around the French 7c mark. Certainly if it was French 7b I'd have thought it would have had lots of onsights and probably one before SG did it, where did you read/hear that?


Actually the candidates for the first E7 were I thought, The Bells, The Bells (1980), Requiem (1983?), Deathwish (198 dunno) and probably others

In reply to stp:
Have you climbed the route? If so, fair enough, you have your opinion that it should be E6. If not, then we only have the opinions of people who have climbed the route.

Your comments about sponsors and ego can be taken the other way - sometimes people intentionally downgrade difficult routes in order to appear better climbers. There was also the issue about grading a new route at a standard that was higher than anything at the high - just how much harder was it?


Bollock is it, climbing 'history' is flexible anyway.

And while you can apply a sports grade to a trad route, doing the reverse doesn't make any sense, along with your comments about Statement of Youth.

In reply to stp:

Not sure about the F7b bit, Steve. Did you do it, back in the day?

I went on it for a brief "first session" with Keefe last summer, and to be honest we both felt the climbing was worth F7c+.

Any laudable intentions of checking out the gear first, and then placing my carefully arranged pre-racked runners on the lead, were very rapidly consigned to the land of the cloud cookoo...

Neil

In reply to stp:

I tried Strawberries last summer and got to the crux sequence - getting established in the left hand crack - before falling off. It then took me a good half hour to dog my way to the top. As Neil says, it would be F7c+ to lead, placing the gear. No way is it F7b in a million years. Or E6 to on-sight. You'd certainly have to be on-sighting F7c+ or more like F8a to on-sight it. It's a really complicated sequence of limestone style sport-esque moves... and you somehow have to place an unobvious wire in the middle of the crux, or make a really big runout and face a potential 50 footer. I did Mussel Beach the following day 1st redpoint (F7c+/8a), so it wasn't exactly like I was unfit.

P.S. Mr Sellers also got spanked the same day and it's rare he falls off E6s.

In reply to Tom, UKC News Editor:

Maybe the F7c/8a was really a F7b that suited you Of course consistency and honesty in grading is what counts most, with a pinch of sceptisism on upgrades to stop grade creep.

In reply to Offwidth:

To be honest, Strawbs is my kind of route. I like steep, burly cracks and have on-sighted 5.12c and E6 cracks. Strawberries is just one of those legendary routes (rightly so) that folk don't want to upgrade for some reason, maybe because of its historical significance. Zippy got it spot on at E7 6b in his Tremadog guide.

In reply to Tom, UKC News Editor:

I think Offwidth might have been kidding you a little!!!

Interesting thread showing that people are getting out and trying such routes - and since both you and Neil F seem to have agreed that its nails you won't find me arguing

Made Dave Macleod should include it in his summer roadtrip.

In reply to Simon22:

Desperate Dan may well get E6 in the new Northern England guide.


Chris

In reply to stp:
I did this route a long time ago. It was given E7 in the guide at the time but personally I think it is hard E6. I found it harder than some 7b+ sports routes that I had done at the time and I was regularly onsighting 7b sports routes then. It has 2 quite hard crux sections and is really strenuous, and placing some of the gear is desperate.

In reply to stp:

I've belayed it twice, it definately looks E7!

In reply to Neil Foster:

I belayed Ben Moon on it in 84 the same year he did Statement. He did the 6th ascent I think. He did with 7 falls and no dogging. Once he'd finished he stripped the gear and I had a go. I had 3 falls (no dogging) and fell inches from the finishing hold but then we had to leave to hitch back to Capel.

That same summer Ben did Statement which took him 8 days of work, dogging every bit. A route you do with 7 falls can no way be graded the same as one that takes you 8 days of work. I tried Statement that year too on Ben's ropes but couldn't do a single hand move on it (apart from the easy section at the bottom). I think Ben also did Masterclass that year which is 7c+ which I think took him 3 days of dogging if I remember rightly.

I find it very hard to believe both Masterclass and Strawberries are worth the same french grade. Masterclass was considered the hardest route in the country in 83, a step ahead of anything else. Yet with these grades a 7c+ on gear can only be harder.

I thought Dream Topping was supposed to be much, much harder than Strawberries and that was supposed to be 7c+.

BTW in Zippy's guide someone else changed the grades of the routes before it went to print. I don't know what he gave Strawberries but I very much doubt it was E7. He wanted to give Atomic Finger Flake E3 6a.

In reply to stp:


You mean it's not E3??

No wonder I couldn't do it.

In reply to stp:
I think that Strawberries is peculiar in being quite easy to nearly do, and nails to complete. Why are you bothered anyway ? Has'nt it settled as a concensus as a tough E6?

In reply to stp:

Because AFF *is* E3 6a and the crux isn't even the flake itself! (admittedly there is a sneaky way to do the flake that reduces the grade but in reality it is a sideways lurch between big *big* holds with a runner above your head)

I'd sooner go on AFF than something like Void or Venom.

boB

In reply to wire:

Well it seems like the new concensus is E7 though it's interesting to hear from someone else who has done it and thinks it E6.

In reply to stp: if i can be allowed to quote the famous tony ryan: "i've done more E6s and E7s since i gave up than i ever did when i was climbing in the 80s!"

indeed

In reply to stp:
I think that this is one of those cross-over routes, where most people used (or use today?) retro type sports techniques to climb it, so there is a tendency to compare to sports grades. I used yo-yos myself, although I did pull my ropes through on the final go. So that would be modern cheating by the UKC pundits standards, but so what. Because it is quite inconveniently situated and is a bit of an effort to get to you have to approach it as a trad route for all that it is well protected. As I say I am almost sure that the climbing with bolts would be 7b+; if it is E5 than an awful lot of E5's are going to be downgraded. The individual crux moves would be British 6b boulder problems off the ground, which is quite hard enough for me. It is actually a very high quality climb regardless of the history or anything else. The real controvesy may be that the hold that completes the crux may have been chipped before the first ascent, as it has a very suspiciously flat base to it.

In reply to stp:

Keep it at E7 - better use of the grading system rather than cramming routes into lower grades.

In reply to stp:

There seems to be a disparity in the sport grades people are using to grade this - Briggs and Sellers reckon 7c+ and you (and Moony apparently) seem to imply 7b.

Is this down to the fact that sport grades in the UK in the 1980s were brick hard, and then during the 1990s, on the continent 9as became almost ten a penny (and 8bs were your warm up) even though Hubble and Action Direct were 8c+ according to Moon.

Or is it due to ethics. You can't really criticise if that (as I believe) was what everyone else was doing, and (a yo-yo is fundamentally a type of ground up as oppseod to top down) but indulge me: did Ben leave his ropes clipped between falls or just leave the gear+QDs in and pull it? It sounds like other people were more intent on working the line for a redpoint style tick.