11
news / Re: significant repeats
« Last post by Johnny Brown on Yesterday at 09:21:13 pm »Quote
many people use E grades (particularly those like yourself who don't spend much time climbing safe long cracks etc).
Many others say how hard is it overall…
Many use them both ways. Grades only make sense in the context of the rock they are applied to. That context is always obvious from the guide or the crag, and within that context the grade is just shorthand for various properties of the route, the properties varying with the route. That’s it.
But people sometimes ignore that context. Why would they do that, when the two things are inseparable? Usually because they are hoping to reduce the comparison of apples and oranges to two numbers. This usually falls down, because there are lots of styles of climbing, and lots of types of climbers, and while (I have just discovered) some climbs are harder than others, not in a way that you can predict without knowing the climber and the climb, and even then not reliably. You’re back to context again: the map is not the territory and the grade is not the climb. (Which is what Shark used to think, so let’s not take his views too seriously.)
And I’ve done plenty of long safe cracks thank you very much, although a lot of them were graded YDS. On some E plus tech would have given me more information up front, but on long routes the usual NA approach of grading sub-sections on the topo is better anyway.