UKC

Just got a bit confused...in Britain when we talk about Font grades its usually 4,4+,5,5+,6a,6a+... but the Font guide I have has grades 5a,5b,5c,6a similar to British tech grades??

I guess my question is...why are Font grades in Britain different to Font grades in Font????

In reply to phja: We do the same with sport grades too, at the same point on the scale.

I think the Font guides tend to use the "+" after the "a/b/c" above 6 too. We just separate the 4s and 5s into 2 instead of 3 sub-grades. I think it's sensible personally, when I was a french 5 climber, I couldn't really tell the difference between 5a/b/c. As for the 4's, I think it's daft to define 4a/b/c as something that requires very little strength is bound to be very morpho and technique dependent (which I don't think you can grade for). In font, some of the 4b's are way harder than the 6as anyway, so what's the point?

In reply to phja:

Good question especially since UK tech grades were originally font grades via southern sandstone.

Font always had a,b,c subdivisions and started at 1. In the UK most boulderers used font grades but most of them operated from 6s upwards so easy problems (ie 4 and 5) just got a the number designator with or without a plus.

Low grade font problem's grades are now almost meaningless due to polish (a 1 friction slab in a popular area can be harder than a 4 that's unpolished elsewhere).

In reply to Offwidth: I have a hunch we'll disagree about this, but I think accurate grading of easier boulder problems (Font 4 and below) is impossible, and so just using the word "easy" or the rather patronising "fun" employed sometimes is a better idea.

It seems to me that Font grades give you something like the amount of strength needed to climb the problem, by the easiest sequence, when you're doing it with good technique. So, they work OK in the upper grades when everyone climbing (within a certain margin) has good technique.

At the lower grades, some people will climb with flawless technique but little strength (might be someone who's climbed for 50 years) while many people who climb them will have totally unbalanced strength for climbing (e.g. gym rat who can do 50 pull-ups but has never climbed before) and no technique. These are extreme examples of course, but the point is that of all the people climbing the problems, their experience of the relative difficulty will be completely different. What is "the average beginner"? Sounds like an impossible job to me, and I would just start at 'easy' then 4 then 5, then 5+, and on to the usual grades.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

We have had this argument before and you never counter my arguments with anything sensible. I'm that rare beast with all round ability at the lower grades and tons of experience (including guidebook work and the team opinions on bouldering grades) and I've climbed now at most areas in Font so I know what unpolished and super polished Font can be like at the same nominal grade and colour circuit. I've also climbed there with very big groups with a range of people looking at stuff from lowball yellow to F8a.

My distilled experience is that its rare for the stuff from 6s to be way out grade wise, yet normal for 4 and below. The idea that you can't grade low grade stuff is frankly idiotic as is the implication that the only people that climb them are beginners or that people climbing them just want 'fun' as a label when they might be inadvertantly be looking at soloing an E1 5a (eg Purple at Dame Jouanne). As ever, people lacking the pre-requisite technique will find stuff, tricky for the correct grade but F4a slabs that spit off UK6a slab climbers aint F4a.

In reply to Offwidth:

I agree that finding the unpolished Font rock makes a huge difference to whether the grades make sense, and that the purple circuit Dame Jouanne is a terrifying nightmare of a thing, especially in the autumn when its covered in debris. (But I don't know how it's relevant to the Font system which doesn't take the likelihood of horrific injury into account - the "deathball" symbol as per Jobbly is fine for this I say).

But you haven't addressed my point that while climbers operating in the 6+ grades have relatively similar levels of strength and technique, climbers operating in the 3s and 4s will differ wildly in which problems they can get up and which they can't, and hence grading them "hard 3b+" etc (or just 3b) is a complete waste of time.

I think it would be just about possible to grade them in a similar way to the higher grades, i.e. an experienced climber will need to pull slightly harder on this one than that one, but I fail to see how that would help a beginner climbing them to judge what they might be able to get up.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

debatable...

anyway i'd say grades below 6a don't need a finer subdivision because of other reasons:

1)history. Before some date that must be in the 50s or 60s, bleausards were using a welzembach-like scale, closed at VI or 6 (the limit of human possibilities, probably defined as Pierre Allain's limit...).
Then they started to open it up : 6a, 6b, 6c...but also 6d and 6e and 6f were invented, later rearranged as 7's.
And the reference for fontainebleau, bleau.info, does use the following subdivision: 4+,5-,5,5+,6a,6a+,etc...

2) As one point all climbers get to a point where getting even better/stronger takes such a considerable amount of time/effort that very fine grade subdivisions individually make sense (not only in terms of "+" but even in terms of hard or soft for its grade...).
Probably, most climbers only experience this phenomenon at grades higher than 6a?

3)Grades higher than 6a start to be perceived as having a sort of "status" value, which is an incentive to the finer subdivision.

In reply to phja:

I've got a whole load of different guide books for Fontainebleau, some of which are quite old, and sometimes they use a, b, or c after the number, sometimes -, nothing or +, in others words each number is subdivided into three levels. Just to add a bit of spice some put + or - after the number and letter ie. 5a+ !

It's not that hard to get the idea though, and as said, polish, your physical size etc all do their bit to reduce the accuracy... Grades are only an indication anyway, no big deal.

In reply to Offwidth:
I fed the whole of your reply into Google.
It offered one word, "branleur" - not sure what it means?

In reply to Steve Clegg:

It's what some people do behind rocks, not on them