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news / Re: significant repeats
« Last post by northern yob on Today at 07:05:06 pm »Well, there's the obvious longer ones - Walk of Life, The Long Hope Route, Muy Caliente etc, but I'd agree that for the most part that's for very different reasons, and not really what we're talking about.
In the context of this discussion, I was more thinking of, well, pretty much every highball esque route I can think of. Think people have just been using WSS and Careless Torque etc as examples that most people have tried or done and so know something about. But if people can't agree whether Careless should be E6 or E8, or WSS should be E4 or E6, even when they use exactly the same sequence and completely agree about the physical difficulty, then I think it's hard to argue that everything is fine. And it's also not hard in that context to see how something like The Promise or various highbally things of Francos, could get such different grades from different people (and yes pads also come into the picture obviously).
Franco seems to think the E grade is so broken he's attempted to create his own grading system. Dave Mac never graded Echo Wall, which I don't know, but I'm guessing wasn't a Sharma esque snub at grades in general, but more that he felt things were all over the show and giving E11 or E12 or whatever didn't mean much until everyone was agreed on how the grading system should actually work.
I do think there's something resembling a coherent system forming finally towards the top end, and whether it sticks or not, perhaps James Pearson giving Bon Voyage E12 is a good marker on a well accessible and likely popular route to compare other things to. Although as you say with these things often not seeing a lot of repeats, it perhaps takes longer to sort out than would otherwise be the case, and so no doubt there'll be lots of adjustments down the line. How many of the current E10s and 11s are actually overall harder than old skool E9's like Face Mecca, Widdop Wall or Dangermouse? I guess we might know in a few decades.
So, perhaps I over egged it slightly above.
But, really the beef is just that as has been evidenced by this thread, various people who've been in the climbing world their entire lives still can't agree what the E grade is meant to represent. Which is pretty ridiculous.
As already mentioned above… they are pretty much irrelevant for any highball, mats, font grades etc etc
As for Franco…. I’ll defer on if he’s the messiah or not…..
For me it’s a misconception that E grades are broken, they work actually quite well and convey more information about the climb than most other systems… there isn’t a perfect system and I’ve yet to see any proof that anything else would work any better. With regard dangermouse, widdop wall the same thing would occur regardless of the system, some things are graded harsh some aren’t… your Gibson is balanced out be a Gresham… If you truly believe people who have been climbing their whole lives would suddenly agree on the grade of things if another system was used, I think your smoking crack!!