@northern yob: As I said before, I'm not in the camp that wants to ditch E grades. I'm suggesting improving how they are defined and used. Because if it stays as complicated as it is currently, the younger generation putting up new routes will just say screw this and give their new route Fr8b R (which I think we both agree would be a step backwards).
"I genuinely find it fairly ludicrous that anybody could expect to climb E4 anywhere"
On that, we can agree - I don't expect to climb any particular grade anywhere. I'm well aware that there's plenty of niche's from offwidths to armbars where any grade I'm likely to have a frickin mare on.
That's fine.
I do expect E4 to be
defined the same way everywhere, otherwise E4 doesn't mean anything.
That's an entirely different and entirely reasonable thing to expect.
As has become clear over the various threads there's (at least) two fundamentally different ways of defining how E grades should be used in play here.
There's those of us saying they should be the overall grade of the route including everything.
And JB (and others agreeing) saying that the physical difficulty of any hard start to a route should be discounted from the E grade except in how that hard start influences how tired you are on the higher part.
So for JB, the start of a route could be a Font 8C slab into an E2 finish, and as long as you weren't pumpted from the Font 8C, then he'd still give it E2.
Now I've finally understood what he was talking about, I can just about see how you could persuade yourself that this is sensible.
But I really don't think that's the best way for E grades to be used at all.
And whilst we're all agreed that you don't need to use E grades on small ish highballs, there's a continuum right, from 20ft routes to 30ft routes to 50ft routes. A lot of these (and indeed higher routes) have boulder problem starts, some of which people have included the difficulty of the boulder into the E grade and some of which people haven't.
What's the problem with the above:
- It took many pages on an internet forum for most of us to grasp what JB was arguing for. It's complicated. For all normal length routes, the E grade is based on the overall difficulty. With JB's version, there's a subset of routes where you do something entirely different and ignore physical difficulty if it's safe and short (other than how it impacts how you feel on the higher bit). But noone is ignoring any physical difficulty on long safe routes.
- How big is a boulder problem. ie: on WSS it's easy to see which bit JB is ignoring the physical difficulty of. On other routes it ain't that simple, and people will always disagree whether the physical difficulty at 10ft, at 20ft etc should or shouldn't be counted in the E grade. It just doesn't work.
- It means you can't compare ascents in different places, which is one of the main points of grades in the first place. ie: flashing an E7 with JB E grades, could be as impressive as flashing a normal E10. ie: it makes any climbing news revolving around person has climbed E grade x, impossible for anyohe to know how newsworthy it is without knowing the intricate details of how E grades are used in that little bubble.
The above isn't the usual grading disputes that northern yob has described happening in all other aspects of climbing. If people were arguing about the specific number on a specific climb, within the context of an agreed system, that would be fine. But that's not what we're talking about - we're talking about completely different ways of defining how E grades should be used.
All I've tried to do in these and previous posts is try (in vain clearly) to get agreement on a simple clear definition of what E grades are actually meant to mean.
To me there's only one way of doing that:
E grades represent the overall grade of the route, incorporating everything including all aspects of physical difficulty, danger, and everything else.
That's it.
A straightforward definition like that means that you can pick a style (onsight, flash, headpoint) and compare the route in question to all the other routes you've done in the same style, when giving it an E grade.
That is a grading system that is clear, simple and easily understandable.
And it's not some enormous revolution.
We're all agreed that we don't need E grades at all for at least the smaller end of highballs. And the above is already how pretty much everyone climbing longer routes thinks of E grades already.
The only legitimate argument for JB's view of the world that I can think of is what Will pointed out. ie:
"It's always had to be that way to stop boulderers going round thinking they've done some big E number."
But the easier way of doing that, is as said before, to not apply E grades to highballs until they are high enough so that the E grade is different than what would be needed for physical difficulty alone.
The irony of all this is that I suspect that in defending the ancient idiosyncrasies of how E grades have often been used in the past, and keeping in play all of the crazy different complications and subsets of things with different rules, JB and others may be unintentionally giving ammunition to those who want to do the opposite of what they want, and ditch E grades altogether.
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