UKC

Toni Lamprecht has linked Bokassa's Fridge (Font 8C) into Assassin Monkey and Man (Font 8C) to create a super hard boulder problem link, which he has graded Font 8C+.

Toni says:

"It was a lucky day, when I did it, because I needed 6 tries on that day and I don't wanna tell you where I fell before succeeding."

Read more at http://www.ukclimbing.com/news/item.php?id=46474

In reply to UKC News:
Good stuff.
James

In reply to UKC News: amazing stuff!, did he do the whole of both 8C's? if so, thats pretty sick!

But should it really get a font grade? It's 27 moves long...

In reply to Strife:

The jury has been out on that one for a long time, with no resolution in sight.

I gave some traverses I did at the Happy Boulders a sport grade and a V- grade - V-grades stuck.

Then we have boulder-routes to add into the equation.

It's all climbing and the grade, whatever type you give, gives an estimate of the difficulty.

This one by Lamprecht must be up there with the hardest sequence of moves done. Just don't ask anyone to rank it in comparison with others because no one knows.

Mick

In reply to UKC News: Wait a minute. O.K, I understand that one problem after another makes the second harder but think about it. If you do 2 font 6a's one on top of the other, that would be font 6a+. Then stack another on top and it would be font 6b etc etc. So by that reasoning, if you stack 18 6a's on top of each other it would be font 8c+. Surely that can't be right.

In reply to Ackbar:
You are correct, it wouldn't.
This prospective Font8c+ boulderer would be able to shake out fully on every single hold and would find it all easy. The 8c+ would probably be more accurately rated as F9a (or harder I'm unsure on how to convert) and you couldn't really have the hardest move on a F9a being font6a.
James

In reply to Ackbar:

There's generally a unwritten rule to only combining 2 problems I think. I've heard quite a few sport climbing extensions described as a font7/8 on top of a F7/8/9 sport climb. Giving an obviously higher F grade for the whole line.

In reply to UKC News:

His achievements are even more remarkable when you see the size of the bloke. I climbed with him for a few days in Hueco many years ago and I just recall him being an absolute giant. Luckily for me he was recovering from injury so didn't try anything hard enough to require me to spot him.

In reply to Paul P:

No there isn't. If you combine several problems of similar grade, the result is usually a problem of a harder grade. The grade isn't arrived at by maths, but by how hard the problem feels, thus no matter how many 6A's you linked up, you'd never make an 8C, simply because an 8C climber is never going to find 6A's difficult, no matter how many there are.

There is of course a grey area in grading when problems become so long they feel like routes. In these cases, many climbers feel unhappy with applying a bouldering grade normally used to indicate the required level of strength or power. So for route-problems where the main difficulty is a test of stamina, climbers often use sport grades to describe the difficulty in more familiar terms.