UKC

As we all know, the British trad grading system is both the best and worst in the world with many nuances and quirks. 

My question is, not having experienced much E3 what is the "average" tech grade for E3?

This is a complicated question I know. But my thoughts behind it are, up until E3 each grade has a bold/sustained, average and safe tech grade that relates to the adjectival (obviously there is a little variation within this, just because it has a safe hard move doesn't mean there aren't easier bold sections on it too). For an example of this HVS 4c, 5a, 5b. But as far as I'm aware E3 usually straddles 5c - 6a not leaving such a clean cut relationship.

This question is meant to be light hearted and not by any means serious as I think it was Jack Geldard who said something like, it's just an alpha-numerical rating system for a piece of rock.... 

6a innit.

I like the way you have cut through the normal UKC waffle and cut straight to the answer-6a innit, to which I reply - Yep!

In my opinion its 5c as the 'standard' tech grade. 

I always felt it runs like this: HVS/4c, E1/5a, E2/5b, E3/5c, E4/6a E5/6b. 

From then on it gets tricky due to the broadness of the 6b grade so I tend to switch to thinking in french grades for the 'average' difficulty expectation.

This in my head runs as (with a bit of crossover thrown in for reference): E4/f6c, E5/f7a, E6/f7b, E7/f7c, E8/f8a, E9/f8b, E10/f8c. 

However in practicality it can be very hard to find trad routes that are well protected enough to match with this 'standard' so you end up with even relatively well protected E9's such as The Big Issue (E9 6c) being f8a+, but you can see how this comes pretty close to the theoretical 'standard' grade. 

To come back to the original question I'd say an E3/5c will generally be a relatively well protected climb at around f6b/+ (possibly better to apply the Fontainebleau equivalent for short outcrop routes which would be Font 5c/+ or so) and what I would deem the 'average' E3. 

Routes with a 5b or 6a rating would in my experience introduce further excitement in the form of a hard crux or bold runout on easier ground - one of my favourite things about british trad is that the variance of experience can be so great within a single grade because the nature of the route is so heavily influenced by the protection  

I think the modal tech grade for E3 might be 5c, especially due to bolder rock....on grit and in the mountains.

Edit...

Apart from the lower end HVS 4c and E1 5a bit, I agree with Mischa who's post hadn't come up when I was writing mine.

I think its hard to use sensible arguments linking tech to adjectival in a meaningful way from mid extreme as the UK tech grades are plain broken above 6a (being much too wide) due to macho idiocy in the past. Grade widths at the top end should have been based on roughly equivalent noticable differences (as per pretty much every other grading system in the world). In the UK we have taken a brilliant idea and broken it and the result directly contributes to a discouragement of  hard onsights (the grading system you learnt to trust stops working as you get to elite grades). I can see UK tech eventually being dumped in guide descriptions of hard trad routes because of this.

HVS 4c is a grade that makes me nervous - I'd expect it to be bold or extremely sustained.  HVS 5a is more normal imo. 

E1 probably a 50/50 split between 5a and 5b - 5a doesn't ring the same alarm bells as on an HVS 5a, 5b is probably cruxy or very well protected.

I'm not really qualified to offer an opinion beyond that.. 

For an E1 climber HVS 4c is a great grade!

You need re-calibrating, or maybe you climb a lot of grit.

Looking at the UK as a whole: HVS 5a is bog standard, E1 5b is also bog standard.

I'm going to triple check the description before embarking on any route given E1 5a as it might well be dangerous.

From experience 5c. Then 6a. Then 5b/6b!

4c is a small minority of tech grades  for grit HVS. The average grit HVS is maybe top end 5a... not so different to most rock types

I'd definitely go along with this, it being my kind of territory.

I'd have also gone with the general progression of E2 = 5c & E3 = 6a but I had a quick look at the logbook for Bwlch y Moch, a crag I'd think of as having pretty standard grades. There you get 11 routes at E3 5c and 9 at E3 6a (with one E3 5b).

For me the standards have been VS 4c, HVS 5a, E1 5b.

By the time we get to E2 things start to get a bit compressed - I have a 50/50 split between 5b and 5c, but then I would always veer towards to the bold ones. And all the E3s I did (and there weren't many) were 5c, but all bold, so maybe 6a is the default. I'm not sure if I've ever done a 6a move where I didn't utilise my long reach, so I can't really judge ! 

However beyond 6a it seems to me that the tech grades get really compressed, which is a shame. It seems that the usefulness of the system has been lost by a modesty which hasn't been seen elsewhere. Why have people been prepared to claim big (and hypothetical) E grades but not tech grades. Maybe Supersonic should have been Britain's first 6c ?   

HVS 4c and E1 5a are both pretty rare and not 'normal'. they will either be very bold or very sustained, occasionally both!

Interesting. In my head, the"standards" are:

VS 4c

HVS 5a

E1 5b

E2 5c

E3 5c/6a

E4 6a

E5 6b

Likely true, it's been a few years since I climbed VS/HVS in any volume other than a solo run of the Stanage VS challenge in 2016 - recent trad exploits were in the mid-E grades or more recently non-existent due to living in Germany and turning into a bolt clipper. 

The bulk of my early trad was done on grit/slate so as you say it's probably worth re-calibrating for the lower grades on the broader scale of the UK.  

Recently did La Demande and got a reminder of what thrutchy HVS crack feels like. Great stuff. 

As suggested above I've done a lot of grit/slate in the past which has likely skewed my perception towards the bold side. 

Personally I'd still stick with 5c for E3 though. 

For what is "standard" I'd go more for:

VS 4c

HVS 5a

E1 5b

E2 5b/5c

E3 5c

E4 6a

If only the midpoint tech grade had carried on going up in step with the adjectival grade; i.e. S 4a, HS 4b, VS 4c, HVS 5a, E1 5b, E2 5c, E3 6a, E4 6b, E5 6c, E6 7a,... etc then the UK grading system would still be the best in the world and we wouldn't be having all these boring/interesting (delete as applicable) debates

That would only work if the E6 had moves on it that were three tech grades harder than the E3 - which isn't usually (ever?) the case.

Chris

But they would have been 3 grades apart if the tech grades hadn't been "made" stupidly wide.

Anyway, 6b and above is academic to me (especially as I get older) so the UK grading is ok for me. On this type of debate I'm only an interested (nosy ) bystander.

I think that is Michael's point.!?

The hardest move on an E6 6b is the same grade as the hardest move on a E3 6b - isn't that precisely why we have two parts to the system - or am I missing something?

Chris

Yes but if tech grades had been done properly then the E6 6b would be well scary, bold, sustained, etc but technically easy for E6 rather than pretty standard technically for E6.

Yes.. he means if  the UK tech grades for 6b and above  were more sensibly defined as less wide, then technical  moves on a middling E6 ( in difficulty and protectability terms) would be at least 3 grades harder than on an equivalent E3 (as the bouldering crux grades and tr french grades and US trad grades already are).

An easy solution would be to adapt UK tech grades as follows: 6b, 6b+, 6c-, 6c, 6c+, 7a-, 7a, 7a+, 7b-, 7b

Try Krapp's Last Tape (E3 5b)! You have been warned!

To be honest though my favourite kind of route is E2 4c or E3 5a, lovely, sharpens the mind tremendously and is a good fun day out IMO

That doesn't make any sense to me - the tech grade is the tech grade - the moves is 6b. Because it is on an E6, the move doesn't suddenly become harder.

Chris

Using that system would have resulted in the whole system seizing up somewhere around 7b? 

Nope, it'd carry on E7 7b, E8 7c, E9 8a and state of the art would be about E10 8b. But remember that's for reasonably protected, not too cruxy routes. A cruxy E10 would be 8c and a bold or sustained one would be 8a.

Etc, etc, etc...

So Requim is I think given E11 7a. If tech grades weren't compressed, it would be given maybe E11 8b. I've taken a tech grade off assuming that the big fall means it's bold for the E11 grade. If that's not right then it would be E11 8c (or maybe E10 8b , depends whether you think the E11 bit or the 8b bit is correct, tee hee).

I think you are missing something. The point that several of us feel is that there is a lack of granularity in the the upper reach reaches of the tech grades.

So lets say I can climb Tech 6a, that means there is a lot of granularity in what I can do, even if you start at 4a, but not a lot in what I can't do - 6b, 6c, 7a, 7b? However when you look at Bouldering grades, 4a to 6a is in the range V0 to V3, and above that is a vast and bewildering range (up to V15?)

Would we have even needed V grades if we had the granularity in Tech grades  ? 

Nope, the move is unchanged but if the tech grade bands were of the correct width, then we'd be grading 6b moves as 7a, or thereabouts.

At some stage they (V and tech) would probably have had a 1-2-1 correspondence and each increase in tech grade would imply an increase in E grade.

Doesn't quite work, but + grades from 6a might. Midpoints would then be...

E3 6a, E4 6a+

E5 6b, E6 6b+

E7 6c, E8 6c+

E9 7a, E10 7a+

E11 7b, E12 7b+

And for example a cruxy protected E7 would need to have a 6c+ (or harder) move to still be E7, and a bold one would only need 6b+ moves to get E7. Etc...

Effectively this is splitting each upper tech grade in two but it could actually work because it would only take the next generation of guidebooks to sort it out.

Sort of in response to your deleted post ...

Basically a grading system (probably for everything not just climbing) is ideal when it increases by one grade once most people can agree that the item being graded is harder/bigger/whatever than something the grade below.

I.e. as soon as the difference is generally discernable. Obviously there will still be borderline cases and hard for the grade etc., but the basis should ideally be as I've put above IMHO.

Edit: having now probably confused loads of people (if they've bothered this far), and gone philosophical, I think it's time to shut up (me at least).

One problem people report is that as things get harder the differences become more and more determined (or masked) by body morphological characteristics. Having more tech grades woukd exacerbate this. 

I'm a firm fan of tech grades btw!

This seems way out to me. 4c and 5a are at the bold ends of HVS and E1 respectively and 6b is safish E5, so it is not linear. I think few would argue with 5a for "standard" HVS and 5b for E1. Above this gradual compression of the the tech grade begins to kick in, so about 3/4 of the way from 5b to 5c for E2, midway between 5c and 6a for E3, 6a for E4, midway between 6a and 6b for E5. Probably 6b for E6.

Not incorrect, just non-linear relative to the adjectival grade. Anyway, yes I agree - see my post above: if nonlinearity/compression did not kick in above E1/5b, then it would be E2/5c, E3/6a, E4/6b, E5/6c, E6/7a. So 7a would replace 6b for standard E6.

This argument gets trotted out from time to time, no offence but usually from those with no experience of the grades they're talking about! There's absolutely no reason why overall and tech grades need to go up at the same rate. There's probably a few reasons why they don't, but one very good reason is that from around E3 upwards fitness becomes a major factor, not just the ability to do the moves. A long sustained overhanging E3/4 5c stamina-fest is something which doesn't have an equivalent in lower grades.

You've pretty much answered your own question IMO.

Of course not! 

I really like this idea. So you are saying that at higher grades, a step in overall grade is affected increasingly by pumpiness as well as technicality, so there will be less variation in technicality across a single adjectival grade. Makes perfect sense

Which would be great if it were not for the fact that you are both wrong..........

Definitely. It's not that the moves are any harder than an E1 5c or E2 5c, just that there are more of them and/or the pitch is longer. It's got to be reflected in the overall grade.

I've experience up to e5/6, and at things point I generally go to sport grades/ asking my mates, as UK tech grade doesn't really tell me much.  Personally,  I'd rather see Michael's method used as at least it gives you that hard/physical or hard/ mental split (or just hard/hard!) that tech grades currently don't as they are so wide. 

Easy realy

E3 goes with 5c and E5 goes with 6a (classic Allen/Bancroft routes)

for some reason E4 has not been a favourite of mine, maybe this explains it and E4 is filler at 5c+

That's fair enough, and you'll know much better than me about climbing at that sort of level. I don't have a problem with 5c/6a (in terms of the feel of the grades) but can't speak for above that. I do think people should recognise that it's not just the width of the tech grades (at mid-high E grades) that may make them for some a poor relation to sport grades but also the sustainedness, where tech 6a may be technically correct but there's just a LOT of it!

The hardest routes these days often get crux Font grades and so it seems to me the ignorant ones are the few still denying how wide tech grades are above 6a (indicated by the many font grades they straddle). I've seconded up to non-technical E6 and never noticed much difference around E3 in sustainedness compared to E1 or VS or VDiff for those operating at the grade (iif they were mostly as sustained as you say an occasional extreme and solid VS leader like me would never have succeeded seconding these harder climbs). 

5c is probably most common, more so than 6a and a lot more than 5b. 

But if by ‘average’ you mean not too bold or sustained at the grade then it’s 6a. The paradox is that there are probably more E3 5cs than E3 6as around. Probably a reflection of the fact that as you move up the grades you get more bold/sustained routes, so it’s more usual to have an ‘above standard’ E grade. If that makes sense!

Not sure if that was aimed at me, but I didn't say that wasn't the case.

"I've seconded up to non-technical E6 and never noticed much difference around E3 in sustainedness compared to E1 or VS or VDiff for those operating at the grade (iif they were mostly as sustained as you say an occasional extreme and solid VS leader like me would never have succeeded seconding these harder climbs)." 

My main point was the sustained pumpy routes, not just sustained off vertical. Of course there are exceptions and everyone is different but from experience I would generally not expect someone who's top grade is E1 to get up many of these E3 5c routes on second.

I would, as E1 roughly equals f6a climbing and E3, around f6b/+ or so. Those that often operate at that level, generally have a quite a bit reserve on their top (onsight lead) grade to what they are able to get up cleanly on a toprope (no fear of fallin', failing and so on).

That is, unless they are rather bold and not really skilled at climbing (i.e. most of their hard climbs are full on, or nearly solo's)... In that case, they will prolly struggle even on a "average" E1 (as it is *too* technical for them).

If the mode, mean and median is 5c the average is 5c! Maybe the mods could set up graphs of tech distributions for adjectival grades from the database as a public service?

Exactly... E1 leaders (unless super experienced and pushing limits) should have loads in hand seconding E3 5c

How can someone who max's out on E1 have loads in hand seconding two grades harder? It's like saying an E3 leader should have loads in hand seconding E5. In other words, nonsense.

But anyway, that's just my experience when trying various different objectives with various different climbing partners.  

Clearly nonsense. If this were the case there would be roughly as many E3 5b's as E3 6a's and roughly as many E5 5c's as E5 6b's. There are not.

This seems to me the same point that Michael Gordon made to explain the supposed compression of the tech grade except that you see it as the inflation of the adjectival grade.

I don't think you can have a mean grade, since grades are just a rank order of climbability (proportion of climbers who can do it) and not something you can actually measure like a length (you can't say in any meaningful sense that route A is twice as hard as route B or that route C is the same amount harder than route D as route E is than F). I think it a failure to appreciate this fact that leads to a lot of the confusion in discussions such as this.

Not really, I’m just saying that once into the E grades you’re more likely to have routes that are bold or sustained (or both) at a given tech grade so you get more routes with a relatively high E grade. So there are probably a lot more E3 5cs than HVS 4cs for example.

I think E grades work fine up to E6. I can’t comment on grades beyond that. 

I think the idea of splitting the tech grade is the only pragmatic solution. I'd be happy to see a plus and a minus grade (splitting into thirds). This also allows the UKC dataset to provide these pluses or minuses directly, as tech grade voting is split into thirds as well.

Solid E1 leaders need to be capable of doing the occasional 5c move in isolation. So they should be well capable of seconding an E3 5c that has a short but scary 5c crux.

There is no reason at all to expect them to have loads in hand seconding an E3 5c that consists of lots of safe but sustained & pumpy 5c.

If you are maxing out at E1 you are not a solid E1 leader. You need to lead that E1 onsight with a rack with something in hand compared to just seconding E3, with the beta of watching your leader,  and without a rack; both as typical outcomes. As my time in climbing has progressed the younger climbers leading low extremes seem to have even more in hand when leading. I know people bouldering consistently in the f7s only leading HVS now when most E5 leaders when I started would never have had that technical ability..

In reply to Robert Durran

Think on what you said. If the transition from 5c to 6a is 60% up a list of all E3 routes in technical order and 5c is the most common grade. 5c being an average sems pretty meaningful to me.

Exactly. In their development the adjectival side progressed more rapidly  than absolute technical difficulty, hence the non-linear nature

It would be the mode or median, but a mean does not exist where we only have a rank order as you describe. But I don't think it is very useful or meaningful as an average - it is just too crude. If you said the median was at about the 80 or so percentile of the 5c graded E3's, then it would really be telling us something.

I deliberately said "someone who's top grade is E1". How solid they are is going to vary considerably, but just from that information alone I would expect them to be OK seconding E2, but have my doubts over a good portion of E3s.  

The numbers back up your experience, or intuition.

I pulled data on 4391 E3 climbs from UKC (I think that's all of them). The grade breakdown is as follows - 

 * 5a: 11
 * 5b: 345
 * 5c: 2249
 * 6a: 1516
 * 6b: 247
 * 6c: 23

The regional distribution is available here - 

http://planetmarshall.co.uk/pages/distribution-of-e3-difficulty-in-the-uk.h...

Interestingly, the greatest concentration of E3 5bs is not in the Peak, but in the Avon Gorge and North Wales.

I'm working on some other visualizations of UKC data, and will add a way of linking back to the appropriate UKC pages for more info.

Requests considered.

You're a star.. claim a pint if we ever meet..

I intuitively knew this from being involved in and reading so many guidebooks but its nice to have the full confirmatory data. Mode, mean and median all 5c (this will logically mean the 5c average for standard unsustained routes will also apply, albeit high in that technical grade band).

All I need now is to be able to open your blog to see the detail

I've just made a bit of a tweak to improve the performance, try it again and it should be ok (even works on smartphones).

Works better now... it did eventually open on my tablet. I'd obviously like to see similar treatment for more grades with averages that get argued about... VS to E2.

It's in the works, along with some other options for visualizing the data (eg the maps currently show 'unnormalized' data, but the ratio of 5bs to all E3s at a crag might be more informative).

Would be nice to see it the other way as well; i.e number of various E grades for 5c; etc, etc, etc.

This would also mean that we could say the average (mean) for the grade for 5c is E2.726 or whatever, etc. which could nicely provoke loads more discussion.

I'm sure sados like myself (and Offwidth?) could spend ages drooling over such stuff

Normalisation within an area would probably be better than for a crag, unless it's Stanage.

Maybe normalised within a definitive guidebook.

Leaving aside the fact that, as I explained, a mean grade cannot be defined, saying the median and mode are 5c (which they strictly speaking are) is actually very misleading because these measures are far too crude to be useful. Saying that either is 5c suggests that the distribution is roughly symmetrical about 5c which it clearly is not with about five times as many 6a's as 5b's. The median is actually about 81% of the way up the 5c's, so although it is weighted a bit towards 5c, it would be far more meaningful and informative to put the average at 5c/6a than at 5c - but I already knew this intuitively from climbing so much and reading so many guidebooks

IMO on the more sustained routes the tech grade lacks relevence. The crux of an E1 5c is generally absolutely nothing like the crux of an E4 5c, which could be the 10th consecutive 5c sequence.

Oddly for me anything at 4c and below seems to blur together as ‘straightforward’ and anything at 5c and above as ‘tough’. I find it very difficult to distinguish between a 5c and 6a move when really going for it as it all just seems hard!

Except  I always claimed rough symmetry around upper 5c, not so far from the border with 6a. There maybe should be more E3 5a routes but the only one I knew reasonably well is the JD route in the Chew which is harder than 5a.  Northern Ballet (E3 5b).. consensus 5b now?

In my mind it seems in the seventies, when it all came about, I read a  bit by Pete Livesey who clarified it thus:

VS:4c HVS;5a E1:5b E2:5c E3:6a

And so, to me, it has remained. Happily I've had no cause to probe the upper reaches of the system.

OK, that's fair enough as long as you always give that qualification - just saying the average is 5c is misleading.

Not really - The original E grade lists published, I think, in Mountain gave  Right Wall (E5 6a) as the definitive E5.

These are the ones I have.

In Denial (E3 5a)
Father Christmas's Nightmare (E3 5a)
His Satanic Majesty (E3 5a)
The 39 Threads (E3 5a)
Pot-Hole Wall Direct Start (E3 5a)
Jurrasic World (E3 5a)
Speed Trap (E3 5b)
Stretch Goes Green (E3 5a)
No match for climb id:121519
Chanterelle (E3 5a)
The Needle Tree (E3 5a)

If memory serves, when E grades arrived, the only accepted E5s were Right Wall and Footless Crow.

And also I seem to remember that the original list from the Lakes (by Boterill and Whillance? and maybe others) only went up to E4 with examples.

What the above tells me is that though weighted towards 5c, it's really around the 5c/6a boundary. The number of E3 5b routes is much more similar to the number of E3 6b routes than 6a.

In contrast, with E2 although 5b is more common than 6a, the median is clearly going to be 5c. 

Pot Hole Wall Direct looks like a typo according to Steve Crowe (as FA he said 5c)

I don't believe the grade for Jurrasic World from memory the landing is bad but the moves are not high enough to justify E3 5a and they sound at least 5b from the description...  committing move to gain lip of roof....monkey along roof lip then pull over  on a high toe heel to a sloping break (... at 5a??)

Rem's Runnel sounds like one of Dangerous Crocodile area highballs some of us did when a big group of Nott'm folk were organised by  Paul Phillips, checking for the new bouldering guide.... from memory its easier than E3 and harder to start than 5a

Yes there are definitely a few missing, although most likely not enough to skew the stats. I'll look over my code and see if I can find the reason for the omission. I search systematically by grid reference, so either they don't show up in a search or more likely I have some gaps.

My climbing partner has her own grading system which works quite well. It revolves around the concept of mother****ers per metre! I know of several other climbers using a similar grading system!