UKC

So the two times I've been to Font we've more or less ignored grades, and worked on a principle of either working our way around an orange circuit or picking possible looking blue or red problems to work at for a bit. I see no reason to change this. But...

Whenever I've looked at the guidebook, the grades might as well have been assigned by rolling dice - afaict there's been no correlation at all with the difficulty of the problem.

I know that this a fairly well known problem with low graded problems in font. So, two questions:
i) at what sort of level do grades in font actually start to have some connection to reality, and
ii) is there any particular reason - beyond the fact that hard climbers who write guidebooks don't care much about easy graded problems - that it's stuck like this and noone seems to bother sorting it out?

Cheers!

In reply to Ramblin dave:

We might put some grades up on Offwidth one day on popular circuits if there is any interest.

In reply to Offwidth:

Question iii) was going to be "and when are we going to parachute Offwidth in to sort it out..."

In reply to Ramblin dave:

A friend of mine seemed to think the explanation was that if it feels ridiculously hard for the grade, you are probably doing it wrong.
He has spent a lot of time in the forest and has often been scratching his head at a 6a when an old bleausard will come along and indicate that your foot goes 'here' and you aren't allowed to use 'that' hold and suddenly the route makes sense.
Font routes can be incredibly hard to read if you ask me, there's always a clever trick.
This assumes that you mean grades having no correlation only works the one way, easy graded climbs seem impossibly difficult, which has so far been my experience, I rarely find myself cruising up a 6c+ but can often be found staring blankly at a 5b...

In reply to Dandan:

This is often the case, there are some old favourites that I happened to find the right way of doing it and now each time I come back it's routine. Not true for all though, some are just plain hard. I'd say that after a bit the majority of climbs have grades that correspond to something though, but they are always much harder than the same number grade elsewhere.

In reply to Bruce Hooker:
It is not often the case at low grade that there is a trick that explains things. There is sometimes a trick and even with it the grade is usually wrong. Problems are polished because people don't clean their shoes or too much pof has been used on smears and nothing ever changed to deal with that. Many if not most grades on popular cirucits sub 5 are plain wrong. I've climbed in nearly every main area and done circuit after circuit at orange and yellow often in a group and compared things to the quiet places where problems still feel like they did when they were set.

In reply to Offwidth:

Polish is a problem on places like the Cuvier but there are so many other areas. Regularly the easier circuits are retraced, the new Yellow at the Rocher Canon is a good example, it gives you an idea of what a Yellow should be like. Otherwise once you are used to the place you'll see the logic... with a few exceptions of course.

In reply to Ramblin dave:

It was once explained to me as: That 5 is a 5 if your technique is spot on, if you use sh*t technique it'll feel harder.

In reply to SteveoS:

Fives feeling a bit hard is one thing, but when your mate takes time out from ticking most of a blue circuit to be utterly unable to make any progress on a 2b (as happened at Canche aux Merciers last year) it's something else.

It's the 2s 3s and 4s on the orange circuits that I've really got in mind as seeming utterly randomly graded, not 6a's that feel a bit on the tough side...

In reply to Ramblin dave:
Also with the easier climbs you sometimes need to make sure you are 'cheating' enough... if it is supposed to be 2b, you may very well be supposed to slightly jump for the first hold, use that jug way out on the right, take the easy finish etc...

But polish is definitely a factor, as is (as people say) technique! Even the easy routes in Font can be sequence-dependent at the grade.

And yes, partly as a result of the above and partly as a result of just random noise grades at the low end are pretty random. But there are an awful lot of easy climbs if you were going to try and 'regrade' stuff, and there is no central authority anyway (from what I've seen bleau.info doesn't really have the routes below 6a). Plus it is totally dependent on individual people; some inexperienced climbers will struggle up something their equally inexperienced friend cruises up (I should know, I am one!).

In reply to Ramblin dave:

Thats exactly my experience. The same excuses were (and still are) passed on to me. I've climbed enough there now to know its nonsense: most grades that feel wrong are wrong. It's not just super popular orange circuits Cuvier either: almost any area with reasonable traffic has the same problems. Unpopular for me means hardly anyone goes and only on thiose do the grades make sense.

In reply to Offwidth:
Agreed. And to be honest, it's not much of a problem (unlike evil trad sandbags) because if you get half way up a problem and realise that it's massively undergraded then you can just jump off again...

But I'd be interested to know at what point (if at all) the grades become consistent enough that you can pick a bunch of fours / fives / sixes / whatever to try in order to get a vague idea for what level you're actually climbing at...

In reply to Ramblin dave:

Try orange Cuvier or Elephant, or mauve Damme Jouanne...you cant jump off all of them. Sometimes the descents on 'easy' circuits in the big bloc areas feel VS.

In reply to Ramblin dave:

I think half the joy of Font is wandering around a circuit with only a vague preconception of the grade. Kind of 'I'll try a bunch of problems that someone has helpfully marked out for me - some of them will flatter my ego, some will make me work'. Grades, Schmades

In reply to Ramblin dave:

The grades in Font are on average correct, it's everywhere else that's way overgraded.

In reply to SteveRi:

That is indeed part of the joy but you could say that about any bouldering or climbing anywhere: the focus would be on exploratory fun and not performance and we would have no need for grades at all. Yet most people find grades useful sometimes or always and if it's good enough for the harder problems, it good enough for all the problems.

In reply to Offwidth:
Same for the harder circuits for me. I only have a vague idea of the grade of the hardest problems I've done there. Not that bothered. Font is Another Country, they do things different there. I'd be horrified if someone put stupid blobs of coloured paint on the rock here. There, I'm on me holidays.

In reply to SteveRi:

I have nothing against your approach. I wish more would be like that.

In reply to fried:


I think it's the variance rather than the mean that people find annoying.

In reply to Ramblin dave:

The answer is 6a upwards but not including any slabs!

Off circuit stuff at 6 up often seems roughly correct withe same slabs caveat applied.

Who knows why circuit problems graded font 3 or 4 can often feel and probably be v2/3 or 5+/6a.... Probably an ego or unwillingness to recognise grade creep on any level mixed in with them using pof actually making the problem easier combined with the sheer volume of problems. The French seem to delight in being illogical so maybe it's just an extension of that ethos?!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think font has the meanest if the means at low grade. Easily 6 font grades below many indoor walls.

In reply to Offwidth:


Given that in the 6s the grades seem pretty much the same as indoor wall grades to me, this must mean that the steps in the lower grades are tiny. Tiny steps with massive variance = a load of bollocks! Therefore the defence of the Font system (as applied in Font) is somewhat shaky.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think the grade conversion chart in the front of the purple guide says font 5b equates to enhlish 5b-6b. On that basis it all works fine...

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Not really, the easiest that's used is 2, a, b and c, then obviously 3 with the same variants and by then the differences are quite noticeable, no one would say a 4a isn't much easier than a 4c, and so on.

Obviously polish on the old, more frequented sites can screw things up quite a bit but I don't see how any grading system could cope with that... How many other areas get the thousands of visitors that Fontainebleau gets year in year out?

In reply to Bruce Hooker:

My experience is more like 4bs feeling the same as 6bs.

In reply to Jon Stewart:
I can't compare with British grades but Fontainebleau grades are much harder than crag or mountain grades in France... which is fairly normal as it's only bouldering It doesn't get easier with age either except for a few well known oldies who look like bionic man without their teeshirt.