UKC

I've been developing a small bouldering area over the last couple of years, and am in the process of producing an on-line topo describing it. Problem is, I'm rubbish at bouldering grades and aren't really in the situation where I can go to other bouldering areas to try and work out comparisons.

The problems I've unearthed (or un-bushed to be more accurate) are mostly fairly easy so far - I'm guessing in the v0- to v3 range, and I dare say I can mostly take a punt at some sort of grade. However, quite a few of them are pretty high-ball so don't want to lure people onto something that's actually v2 (or whatever) whilst giving it a v0 grade.

Any suggestions (rude or otherwise)?

In reply to AndrewW:
My suggestion would be not to try to grade anything too far below your current level. Lots of guidebooks suffer at the low end because people who lead e4 can't really tell the difference between diff and vs

Get a couple of people of varying abilities to try them.

In reply to davidbeynon:


Don't worry - probably won't be a problem, unless I start going down to minus v2

In reply to AndrewW:

Go for what you feel it is and put some description in the topo if there are some sketchier moves at the top on a highball that might be a struggle.

Also get other people to try the routes and see what they think?

In reply to Pewtle:


Smart.

I remember someone on here once suggesting a grading system where grades go --, -, =, +, ++ to indicate how hard the rest of the route is compared to the first couple of meters, on the basis that it doesn't do any harm to try to get off the ground and you can then work out from the grade whether or not you're happy to keep going...

In reply to AndrewW:

Decent suggestions all. Thanks guys.

In reply to AndrewW:

Just do your best to put them in order of relative difficulty and if you can pin some absolute numbers on a couple of problems (the warm-up and the hardest maybe?) it'll help you grade the others. Ultimately unless you worked these on a toprope or over a bouncy castle everyone else trying them is going to be in a similar position to you, they can use their judgement.

I developed a small crag in similar isolation years ago, I still have no real idea how easy or hard the problems are in real terms.

jk

In reply to jkarran:

Why have I never thought of this

In reply to geordiepie:


Makes the sit down starts harder though

In reply to AndrewW:

Sometimes a little dagger symbol is used next to a grade to show that the grade is unconfirmed or uncertain. Sounds like that's what you want to say and using just one character is a concise way of doing it.

In reply to AndrewW:

I would say, take a few mates along and get them to climb the problems, don't tell them what grade you think the problems are, maybe just 'this one is a wee bit harder' etc...

Once you have two or three suggestions of the difficulty you should have a reasonable idea of the grade.