100% what Adam said… it makes perfect sense, to me at least. Is this a generational thing??
As Adam points out much better than I could, E grades aren’t sport grades… the whole point of them is to convey information, which they do in a not that complicated way, I really can’t get my head round why lots of people have such a problem with it or are against them. There’s got to be some serious miles in this…. Thread split surely.
Adam? Who's Adam?
JB, you seem to have a very strong view on this. I don't - as I've said I have next to no experience of this highball/E-Grade issue. The closest I can think of is
Looney Tunes at Cambusbarron which is (from very distant memory) around Font 6B at a *likely* ankle breaking height. I actually fell off soloing it once and managed to spin round and somehow miss all the boulders but I got very lucky!
@Northern Yob - Generational thing? You being funny? I'm in my 5th decade and have been trad climbing for 20 years. I've climbed trad in Cornwall, Wales, northern Ireland and all across Scotland. E3 and E4 would be the zone where I probably have the best "feel" for grades, and, looking at my logbook I've done 83 E3s and 63 E4s. When I rock up to a new crag in a new area, I usually drop to the more comfortable grades and then build up. I'll look at the trad grade, description, maybe notes on UKC..., eyeball the route then think "aye, that looks a goer". So far I've found grades to be pretty consistent within +/- half an E grade and I've had similar success onsighting wherever I go.
Some places I've had more success, North Wales and Fairhead, for example - maybe I just had a good week, climbing well and good conditions, or maybe they were a bit easier? Who knows.
But fucking hell, if I rocked up to a crag and there was an E4 7a all I'd think is:
Are they on crack?
Please put aside your straw man arguments about trying to relate back to sport grades... no one mentioned that, no one (in this thread) is arguing that. I'm not "back calculating", I'm using the UK trad grade
exactly how most of the people I climb with use it - a scale that gives you an idea of the relative difficulty of onsighting a route.
Maybe in the obscure microcosm of parochial grit weirdness E4 7a makes sense? But in any place where you have to put more than 3 bits of pro in before topping out, it's bonkers and breaks the system.