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The safety of a climb and the difficulty of the climb, are they necessarily related?
Discuss.
(and don’t use identifiable names or include phone numbers and other contact details – after honest comment here.)
Hi Quizzical,
The grade is a technical grade and has no relation to it’s safety other than the fact that more difficult grades are more difficult to do and people are more likely to fall off. The level of safety is easily included in the route description, ie Climb XYZ, grade 15 minimal protection, loose rock and water seepage, as opposed to Climb ABC grade 15, bolts every metre and a half.
Both 15s but vastly different experiences to climb.
Cheers,
Toc.
Quizzy,
Grades aren’t related to danger. You may see a climb rated 18 and another 18R or 18X. The last two are as hard as the first but the protection or lack of makes it dangerous or potentially deadly.
Now is Quizzy Quokka your real name???
Bloody oath safety and difficulty are related. Just take look around here: the most difficult climbs are bolted every 2m and super safe. The easy ones often have deadly runouts. Stoopid but true. But the Perth guidebook separates the two, difficulty is rated using the 1-36 Oz Ewbank scale, while safety is either nonrated (safe or unknown), R-rated (run-out) or X-rated (kiss yer arse goodbye).
Not necessarily. A while back when I was climbing on a grade 25 at Mountain Quarry, a fall at one point resulted in about an 8 metre fall off a cam. (Since then, someone has put in more bolts – see Matt Rosser’s ‘New Bolts on Star Wars Mountain Quarry’.)
Anyway, as it is a bit overhanging and fairly smooth rock, it was quite safe. Now you would probably do youself on one of the CALM bolts sticking out.
Definitely not related.
The difficulty in placing or acquiring protection, i.e. carrots instead of p-bolts (await flame), has the potential to increase danger on easy routes just as much as difficult ones.
A smart bloke I know said that good climbers don’t damage themselves on hard routes, they die on easy ones where they don’t take the necessary precautions – falling down a flight of stairs sans protection can be pretty nasty if you ask me.
This is what I like about the English system. 🙂 The aussie system is good in that it’s very simplistic and the easiest to read and understand, but the English system is also good, because it contains two parts, one based on tech difficulty, the other on ‘epic’ factor. As far as I can remember anyway, I’m sure someone’s about to correct me. 😉
Hi John,
You’re pretty well spot on, the British system does indeed break the assessment up into two parts… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(climbing)#British_grading_system will tell you all about it.
All a bit complicated for my simple Australian mind…
Like I said, they are related. But they are related by reality, NOT by the Ewbank Oz grading scale. Yanks also use R and X in some places, Poms have a silly system that only themselves understand, a bit like their old imperial units. There’s mucho exceptions of course but as GENERAL observation rule in Oz, the harder the climb, the better protected it is. Ciao.
Are you guys including natural gear when you talk about protection? I get this strange suspicion reading some of these postings, that some of you are not. Curious.
depends on whether you consider difficulty as solely being based on the route’s technical grading. logistical difficulties on long multi-pitch routes oft render an “easy” grade climb both more difficult and exposed safety wise when compared to a high grade sport equipped single pitch at a park and climb location. a multi pitch tends to require a wider range of pro placing skills and creativeness as well as figuring out how to get on and off it safely.
i have found that my perception of difficulty and safety is evolving with experience whereas difficulty of the technical grade tends to be more closely related to the ebb and flow of personal strength cycles.
toc, came in behind your post but i include natural gear like trees or holes that i can use slings or cordelettes on or pass the rope behind but my wife usually excludes those due to a lack of lead experience.
Thought i should point out that the John Ewbank grading system encompasses a range of factors, including sustainability,degree of difficulty technical and physical,and exposure. the exposure factor includes a number of features including adequecy of protection,fear factor and even isolation and evacuation difficulties.The John Ewbank system attempts to encompass all of the features of the English grading system it was developed to replace into a single number system, in part to address the previously mentioned complications of the english grading system.
Having learnt to climb under the english system I have to say I find it the most preferable (but then thats probably just my bias).
The beauty of the system is that it answers the original question perfectly, since it address’s the safety of the climb (the subjective grade) and the difficulty of the climb (the technical grade).
The subjective grading goes…
Moderate (M)
Difficult (D)
Hard (H)
Hard Difficult (HD)
Very Difficult (VD)
Hard Very Difficult (HVD)
Severe (S)
Hard Severe (HS)
Very Severe (VS)
Hard Very Severe (HVS)
E1 (E = Extreme, might hurt yourself if you fall)
E2
.
.
.
E10 (Your looking at a ground fall)
The technical grades are only really used from 4 through to 7 with each subdivided into a, b and c (although the hardest UK tech is 7b, anything that claims it goes to 9 is wrong and is thinking of French sport grades). Put the two together and you have a pretty good feel for what a climb is like.
For example a classic climb at Froggart Edge in the Peak District is Three Pebble Slab. This gets the grade (***) E1 5a, this means that technically its not that hard, but there is very little gear on it, and therefore potential for a big fall (you can spend ages about half way trying to arrange some gear in a strange crack in a big pocket, but the placement isn’t too great and it might pop if you fall on it. I didn’t bother and then got the wobbles at the base of the slab when I realised that if I fell I’d hit the deck, but a minute or so to compose myself and I padded up the slab fine :-).
In contrast over at Stanage Edge (about three miles as the crow flies) is a climb called Rusty Wall which gets the grade (*) HVS 6a. This means that technically its a lot harder, but the gear is a lot better (although to be perfectly honest in this instance it simply means the crux is only 1m off the ground, and your not going to hurt yourself if you fall that distance).
Another comparision would be the classic Cenotaph Corner in Llanberis Pass (*** E1 5c, first climbed by the legendry Joe Brown). This climbs a 110ft crack in a ‘book corner’ (between two walls that are at right angles). The gear is absolutely bomber all the way. Compare this to The Brush Off at Rivelin Edge in the Peak District (*** E4 5b/c, theres some contention), which is only about 30ft, and technically not much harder (although its a differnt style since its an arete/slab climb), but given that there is NO gear placements at all, and a nasty tree stump at the bottom its gets a high subjective grade, as a fall would result in serious injury.
Of course being the UK, all of this is naturally placed gear (your likely to get lynched if you start placing bolts in certain areas of the UK). Anything that is bolted in the UK tends to be graded using the French Sport grades, since this is more appropriate to clipping bolts which are generally considered to be less likely to fail (although of course, one should always use their own judgement when assessing the quality of bolts).
It would be nice to see some sort of indication of the ‘seriousness’ of climbs in the grading systems used elsewhere in the world, but its fun learning new grading systems, and then converting them back into what your used to.
Hope that helps explain the ‘silly pom system’. A good couple of pdf’s of how things compare under safe and bold routes can be obtained from
http://www.rockfax.com/publications/pdfs/trad_grade_bold.pdf
and
http://www.rockfax.com/publications/pdfs/trad_grade_safe.pdf
and there is also a similar guide for comparing bouldering grades (Font v’s Sherman v’s Gill (not really used) v’s Peak District B etc.) at
http://www.rockfax.com/publications/pdfs/boulder_grade.pdf
slack (Neil)
