UKC

OK, a nice, simple little survey.
Nothing to do with any dissertation, PhD research or such like; I'm just curious.

When it comes to easier sport climbing grades, are you a PLUS person - as in F4, F4+ / F5, F5+?

Or are you an ABC person - as in F4a, F4b, F4c / F5a, F5b, F5c?

Both systems seem to co-exist in the UK - even though they may not be strictly comparable as the ABC grading introduces an additional sub-grade.

So if you can tell your F4a from your F4b, or if you prefer a simpler two-division system for each grade, what do you see as the advantage of your preferred one over t'other?

If we went over to just using the one system, which should it be - PLUS or ABC?

Thanks in advance for all thoughts and comments.

In reply to Dave Williams:

I've never seen a 4a, 4b etc in a sport grade. You're not thinking English Technical are you? (Including S. Sandstone)

+'s up to five, letters 6 and above.

In reply to Oceanrower:
You definitely get 3a-5c in French grades, unless the authors of various French climbing guidebooks in front of me don't know what they're doing! Having said that, there's at least one area where + is used in conjunction with letters below 6a too. Maybe we're doing it totally wrong over here?

In reply to Oceanrower:



Definitely seen 5a/5b/5c, I think the new Rockfax Northern Limestone does this. Can't say I've noticed the 4's.

In reply to Dave Williams:

We have switched to a, b, c in Rockfax because it is in common use in France and Italy. It is in Spain that the 4+, 5+ system is more prevalent which is where we established our sport grades in the 1990s. We will be using a, b, c from now on in our books and on UKC Logbook for grades of 5 and 4 but not for 3 and 2.

Alan

In reply to Dave Williams:

I was at a wall the other day that used F4b but that was bollocks, it was only a F4a+.

I like the Spanish system of using roman numerals for IV and V, it seems like a way of saying f*ck off, really!?!

In reply to Dave Williams:

You been out with that bloody drill again!!?


Eternity is a very long time in hell!

In reply to Pylon King Against Capit@lism:

Have you been stalking me again? I thought your treatment had been successful.

I'll admit there's something strangely compelling about the tortured wail of the rare Bosch rockpecker, its screech echoing magnificently across the tranquil lake as it drowns out the chorus of spring bird calls ....

Is that why the very bad-ass drills are named Hellti??

In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:



Good move, most of my foreign guides have 4a and 5a. Some even have 5b+ and 5c+ but that seems excessive.

In reply to Dave Williams:
The basis for my curiosity was the clear decision to use the a/b/c sub-division on sub grade 6 routes on Llanberis slate as well as on the A55 cliffs - as opposed to the Climbers' Club for instance, which still uses the plus system in its guides (see the new Swanage guide for example) .
http://www.v12outdoornews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Penmaenbach-A55-topo-V2....
http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crag.php?id=10

Clearly it's no big deal, although IMHO I think it'd make sense to try for uniformity instead of having a typically British fudge. Alan's comment re. a change in Rockfax's policy was very interesting; perhaps in time this decision will act as a harbinger of change.

Thanks for all the replies.

[Edited for poor grammar]

In reply to Chris the Tall:


Oh please no, let's not go there. It is complicated enough!

Alan

In reply to Dave Williams:

in terms of difficulty, what is the difference between f4 and f5??? or even f5a and f5b.

In reply to eivrol:


Climb with people operating at this level as their max and you will see the difference.

Alan

In reply to Dave Williams:

As a fairly inexperienced climber, I'm confused by what constitutes 'a grade harder' due to the consistent subdivisions. For example it seems to me that F4 and F5 are not very far apart in difficulty. But is it one grade 4-5 or two grades 4/4+/5 or three grades 4a/4b/4c/5?? Or is it just one grade with subdivisions? What about F6 where letters and pluses are common is F7 many grades (6a/6a+/6b/6b+...) harder than F6 or just one?

And don't even start on trad... is VDiff above Diff or is HD inbetween? And what about the UKC voting system... Easy Hard V Diff?

I just try to climb stuff and avoid talking about it in case I say the wrong thing.

In reply to eivrol:


Hands-off rest every move, or hands-off every third / fourth move? Genuinely, I don't know and have wondered the same thing.

In reply to Oujmik:


The plus is a full grade harder than one without. There are no "half grades" in French terminology.

In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:

sorry Alan, are you taking a piss? I was looking for something like Fraser wrote so even an idiot like me can undestand it.

In reply to Fraser:

cheers, that makes a kind of a sense

In reply to Fraser:


In which case is F4 to F4+ a full grade? I think you'd say yes. Which means the naming is not definitive, simply nominal (e.g, each step is one grade harder and we've just chosen to call them 4,4+,5,5+,6a,6a+... etc.)

Which is fine, but if the names are arbitrary and do not define a grade, what is 4a, or 5a+? Undefined. If the list is defined by each step being one grade harder than the last, we can't start adding more in.

If the names were definitive we could work out what they mean: 6a+ is one grade harder than 6a so 4a+ must be one grade harder than 4a but this is incompatible with the statement that 4 to 5 is two grades.

Practicall, we have to assume that the three labels 4a,4b and 4c cover 4 and 4+ which is really only a range of two grades. Likewise 5a, 5a+...5c+ are six labels for a range of only two grades but 6a,6a+... are six labels for a range of six grades. This is starting to make adjectival grades sounds positively layman-friendly!

I appreciate that grading is so subjective this is all a waste of our time practically speaking, but I enjoy it as an intellectual exercise.

In reply to eivrol:


Apologies, my mistake. I thought you were asking the family frequent question about what is the difference between these easy grades since to most experienced climbers, the difference between 4a, 4b and 4c is unnoticeable.

Alan

In reply to Oujmik:

A considerable number of us think the grades are 1 to 9 and +/- or abc are sub-divisions. That is the basis I and many others grade new routes and write guidebooks

I find that the grade disparity between crags/regions is much higher at these grades than higher up the spectrum.

So the sort of hair-splitting entailed in a 4a/b/c system only seems useful within a crag with lots and lots of 4s/5s.

Personally I'm a 4/4+/5/5+ devotee for the remaining 90% of crags.

In reply to Dave Williams:
I think part of the problem (particularly indoors) is that people judge anything 'easy' to be a F4, when really grades 1, 2 and 3 do exist. Go to Font, and the 4s are quite tricky! I know this is Font, not French grades, and they are quite erratic but the general trend is still valid... In Font lots of the 1s, 2s and 3s are worthwhile climbs (and there are plenty of 3s that require a bit of thought if you are only climbing 5s).

That said I struggle to tell the difference between the +s and -s, let alone the a's, b's and c's, but you can usually tell between the 2s, 3s and 4s (or if they are under/over graded).

In reply to Dave Williams:

In the end it should just be whatever is useful to people climbing the grade. No idea why a 7's climber would care whether something is graded 4b or 4+. It is inconsistent though as +'s are full grades from the 6's upwards but I can't believe this could work usefully in the 4's (anyone who climbed enough routes to be able to accurately call a difference wouldn't be climbing in the 4's for long). The again 6's are inconsistent as there seem to be a lot fewer 6c+'s than you might expect...

In reply to Alan James - Rockfax:

>> Some even have 5b+ and 5c+ but that seems excessive.


Kalymnos and Ariege local guides have plus grades for everything from 4a to 5c. I can't remember seeing any for 3a to 3c but it wouldn't surprise me! I found them very useful.

In reply to Chris the Tall:

In the Ariége the grades are commonly split 5a, 5a+, 5b etc etc. Most notoriously used on la Dent d'Orlu where you'll find 5c+ to be a real tester

Shouldn't we do whatever the French do - we do call them French grades!

In reply to LeeWood:

If you start off with 5a, 5b, 5c then you can always add the sub-divisions if you feel they are needed
If you start off with 5 and 5+ then you have nowhere to go

Also, why have a different system halfway through the range ?

On the other hand skiing and mountain biking seem quite happy with 4 grades, whereas climbing needs 20/30 per system and a dozen different systems....

In reply to LeeWood:


Agreed, but nowhere near as much of a tester as those given 6a

In reply to Alex1:


Pretty straightforward I suspect, though I don't quite climb at the grade. 7a has a lot more kudos than 6c+, so anything borderline gets given 7a.


Or indeed if they could tell the difference if they did care - as illustrated by eivrol's exchange with Alan J above. Quite why Alan came in for any stick for saying "Climb with people operating at this level as their max and you will see the difference" I don't know.

There's plenty of difference between 4 and 4+, properly graded, if that's at or near your limit. I suspect the biggest apparent difference between two adjacent grades will always be the difference between the hardest grade you can climb and the easiest grade you can't. It doesn't matter where in the grade range you look.

Can anyone explain to me the difference between 7c and 7c+ in language eivrol would accept as answering his question?

Martin

In reply to Fraser:



Our local wall regularly has 5's and often 4's on gently overhanging lines with no hands-off rests. Also 6's on the slab with hands-off rests if your footwork is good enough to use them. I don't think you can describe the difference this way for sport routes. You're better off I suspect trying something like "10% fewer climbers can climb grade x than can climb grade x-1".

Possibly trad could be a little different. I think there is a qualitative difference between climbs where all the gear you need to place can be placed from resting positons, so you can take your time and get it right, and climbs where some at least of the crucial gear needs to be placed where there is no rest. It's somewhere around the VS/HVS boundary I would suggest.

Martin

In reply to Dave Williams:

I don't think anyone thus far has mentioned the glorious and versatile x- grade.

Why limit yourself to only the usual 5a, 5a+, 5b etc when you can bump it down a whole other half notch and open up such classics as 5b-, and 6c-?

I feel this omission greatly detracts from the available granularity of confusion.

In reply to Dave Williams:

I couldn't care less, nor could I really use the information to any advantage. All F3, 4 or 5 means to me is it'll be harder than I'm expecting and that I should probably warm up by putting the clips in the project instead

jk

In reply to Dave Williams:

For sport grades they should just be a number until you reach F6 and then subdivided by letters.
English trad tech grades don't usually start being used until 4a although you do get the odd 3 in some places.

In reply to johncook:


This is the (original Spanish?) system that's been in use here since at least the '80s. However, my original question arose from the fact that this is no longer used on the continent as the (French?) number and letter system appears to have totally supplanted it for routes in the F3 - F5 grade range. Seemingly, there is also a move afoot to do the same here, with recent UK guidebooks using numbers and letters for sub F6 routes rather than F5/ F5+ etc.

I'm ambivalent about which to use or even which is best. I doubt whether I could really differentiate between a F5a and an F5b anyway, but nevertheless I feel that it's illogical to have two different systems co-existing in the UK. I started the thread out of curiosity just to see if there was any strong preference for one or other system. Frankly I'm little the wiser ....

In reply to Dave Williams:
In the Ailefroide guide they use the a,b,c system from f3a to f5c. They also use f5c+ on some pitches, a bit like the FRCC langdale guide uses VS+ or VS-, and I've seen a couple of f5c++ pitches which is just a long way of saying f6a.

In reply to Dave Williams:

Personally I think 4,4+,5,5+ is quite adequate without adding another division to the 4s and 5s. I'm not sure there's enough width in the grades to justify putting in more.

In reply to Dave Williams:

F4, F4+, F5, F5+, F6a, F6a+ etc

Makes sense to me.

But I would imagine the abc system in lower grades would make sense to people climbing those grades regularly. So whatever really, it makes no difference ultimately

In reply to Dave Williams:

Personally I don't think that there is enough variance of difficulty between the lowest grades to justify all those definitions. Even the plus grades are pushing it.

In reply to MischaHY:


Yes, but you've led 7b so aren't really the best person to comment on the differences between easy grades! As an E5 climber, can you tell the difference between Diff/Hard Diff/VDiff?

As someone who can climb no harder than 6a on a very good day, I can assure you that 5a/b/c are noticeably different, and when we've climbed in areas that use the + grades (Kalymnos and Ariege) then these have made sense as well.
.

In reply to Dave Williams:

I recently climbed a 5a+ sport route in Switzerland. Imagine my horror when I came to add it to my UKC logbook at it's listed as a 5a! I feel I've earned that +

Honestly, it's all subjective and just a guide. Take with a pinch.

In reply to Dave Williams:

I suppose yet another theoretical issue with all this is the precision of the original 'measurement' and the variation between people. We can add as many subdivisions as we like, but if there are as many climbers that find a 5a+ harder than a 5b- as vice versa then it gives no information whatsoever. It's like asking me to measure something with a 30cm ruler and then asking me whether it was 29.01 or 29.02cm

In reply to Simon Caldwell:

Well, if we're being specific I've lead 8a and E6

That said - yes. I can tell the difference between a diff and a v diff, etc. I just don't think the variance between very low end sport climbs is justifiably wide enough to merit more than two denominations, i.e. 5 and 5+. F6 is where the differences become much more broadly apparent.