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news / Re: The inevitable E grade thread
« Last post by Johnny Brown on Yesterday at 02:02:36 pm »Quote
So not read all the above properly, hope I've not misunderstood the gist
Why bother then? You've misread. Who would possibly relate uk tech grades to sport grades? That would make no sense.
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JB tends to think about this stuff in terms of a particular subset of short grit bouldery routes.
No, which is why I used lots of sea cliff examples. I'm using these, and grit, to illustrate the extremes, which seem to confuse people. No one is confused about the middle of the road.
I will admit to not being very interested about the grades of E9+. Grades are arrived at by consensus, and there isn't any here, because they have few ascents with less objectivity than normal.
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Indian face gets 6c. (ie: a Fr7b+)
Rhapsody gets 7a. (ie: a Fr8c+)
Well, as I keep saying, these are half the grade and E9 6c and E11 7a do tell you rather more. As much, or more, as 7b+ X and 8c+ R?
The question is not 'are E-grades perfect' it's 'is there a better system?' If top climbers found it unusable, they would have adopted something like the above. Why haven't they? Because 8c+ R doesn't suggest something special, whereas E12 might. I can see if you've a preference towards safe, hard climbing, you might prefer 8c+ R because it suggests the difficulty isn't remarkable by modern standards, and wouldn't pull focus from the 'real-deal' 9b+. But others might think the opposite; there are many climbs, and many types of climbers, and plenty of room in the modern media to celebrate all of them.