UKH

There's been a lot of babble lately about tech grades and whether they're more or less useful for trad routes than sport grades or Font grades would be.

Some advocates of tech grades are adamant that the current Adj-Tech grade combination should be left exactly as it is. Which is fair enough, and quite understandable if you're a) climbing mainly in the tech 5a-6a grade range, and b) very used to tech grades after years of familiarity.

But it does seem to suggest that they believe a single-move (whatever that means!) tech grade is a more useful indication of physical difficulty than a sport grade. Again, fair enough - it's an opinion.

But I'm now wondering why, then, I've never heard of any call for tech grades to be applied to sport routes in the UK, or indeed anywhere else? This could be either in addition to, or as a replacement for, the sport grade.

Would such a change be welcomed? Could it catch on worldwide?

Have you been at the ChatGPT Mr Arran?

Sounds a bit like it, eh? But no. Just a genuine question as I realised I'd never thought of the idea before.

Edit: It's a bit like the question: If a monarchy didn't exist, would it be a good idea to invent one?

I do remember discussions in the 80's and early nineties about the translation between trad (Adj-Tech) grade and the sport grade. What does 7b, 7c, 8a etc. actually mean, especially when used to using the British system. Some sport routes originally had trad and sport grades.

Personally, I still consider what the hardest tech grade a sport route may have. For example, is that 7c bouldery, with a tech 6c move or is it sustained with many tech 6b moves and so on.

However, with the passage of time, I think that most climbers in the UK, used to using trad grades, are also used to using sport grades and perhaps going back to adding a tech grade to a sport route would be a retrospective step.

I don't think it is necessary and I don't think it would catch on worldwide, but perhaps might be popular in the UK.

edited typo.

i think boulder grades already do this job, and are more familiar worldwide. i've heard people talking about V-grade of cruxes on sport routes - it tends to be a bit above my grade so i can't comment from experience, but my impression it that people only really talk about this from about V5 upwards, at which point boulder grades are more fine-grained then tech so more useful

Yes, I would agree that font or v grades can also a useful addition to a sport route and are a bit more descriptive of a hard section on the route.

Some boulder problems are also given sport grades if they are long and sustained and that is also useful.

Well played…

but to be honest. I really doubt the tech grade would serve any meaningful purpose… How ever bouldering grades are often used in combination of sport grades, to give a better understanding of What is required for said route. E.g. Pumpy 7c into a good kneebar rest, followed by the 8A crux boulder to a bad rest, then the upper wall of 8a climbing to the anchor… I guess that description could be for an 8c/+ sport route (not that I know, as I don’t climb that hard).

btw. We have one move boulders with bouldering grades…

It would certainly add useful information as to the sustainedness or cruxiness of a route which would be good for route choice. I'd welcome it. Of course it would never catch on worldwide (not using actual UK tech grades anyway!).

Possibly the reason people don't worry about it so much is that nobody ever really comes to harm on a sport route; if a route is too pumpy or too technical they just fall off.

I'd be happy to see brit tech grades next to sport routes. But I don't think it's enough... There is a lot more information needed, at minimum I'd say we really need:

- A bolt quality measurement (this could need to be periodically updated, especially for crags near the sea), say on the old PS to FB scale.

- An average angle measurement in degrees. I have no idea why this only seems to be common on big multipitch routes that involve snow and ice, for me it would be really useful to know if it was a horrible overhang or a lovely vertical wall.

- A "crux length" measurement to give an idea (however imperfect) of how sustained the route is.

- A runout measurement for how far apart the bolts are, quite happy to poach the American R, R/X, X, XXXFu*******!!!! system.

- An obviousness measurement for how hard it is to work out the sequences when there is no chalk.

I think there is certainly scope for more information too. A symbol for RAMD (relative average midge density using the standard g/m3 unit of measurement) would be good. Another for how much harder it is in humid conditions.

I'm thinking that with a sufficiently accurate grade, there would be no need to bother with those long, tedious route descriptions. Something like 40m f7a 6a FB 85 4m R hard 0.05 8

(Sadly I can't work out how to get a degree symbol on the forum, that should be included otherwise the grade might get confusing).

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I think there's definitely an argument for the opposite, of replacing the UK numerical grade with the french one. French grades are far more widely used, especially if people are getting into trad having started out indoors and on sport.  And the problem is the UK grade looks identical and is lower.

So if someone can climb 6a indoors or on sport, then jumps on a 6a trad route they'll get a rude surprise.

Don't see the point. Boulder grades do a good job where necessary.

Welcome to Darth Grader:

https://darth-grader.net/

Doesn't do British technical grades, but who really understands them once they get to 6c and above? But does allow you split up routes by French/US grades of a route into sections based on: route, crux boulder, and type of rest. 

Darth Grader says middle 8c+ for your route: 

https://darth-grader.net/Calculator

Far above my paygrade… but hood to see that I haven’t completely lost my touch on grading.

As someone who started climbing in the 80s when everything on Yorkshire Limestone between 7a and 7c was either E5 6a or E6 6c I still use UK tech grades today, even here in France.

I'll describe a crux as being "a couple of 6a moves in a row, maybe 6b", "really sustained, every move is 5c" blah blah

E

Not if you hardly ever go bouldering so they mean almost nothing to you! Same would apply to French grades for someone who never goes sport climbing. 

Though it's possible, because things feel so completely different onsight on a trad route, I'd be better off with a blank slate of boulder grades to get used to for trad rather than trying to make sense of sport grades in a trad situation.

I actually think my own preferred option if the UK tech grade were to be dropped would be a YDS grade in conjunction with the UK adjectival grade (even though I don't think they work well on their own), since I'm already used to them for trad when climbing in the US. As long as there was agreement on what they are measuring of course.....

Keep as is, but I can see the merit in applying tech grades below S. Whole world within VD (I'd argue, possibly more than almost any other grades, especially as the grading tends to be historic and often enough, the route polished to glass by decades of above-VD climbers wanting a chill day) and it's the one where the UK grading system (which I otherwise like) is pretty much useless. Fine enough if you're a VS climber wanting an easy multipitch day, but not if you're starting out and/or that is your grade. If you die on a V Diff you still die in real life...

In reply to gravy:

There's little merit in reinventing tech grades with a 1:1 correspondence to sport grades but giving them different symbols, especially since everybody is already familiar with sport grades from indoors if not from UK or foreign sport.

Very few sport routes get the grade of VD, S or any of that…

Just goes to show how illogical the trad tech grade is - though it works ok up to 6a as you say. Of course not unusual for hard sport routes to be described with one or more boulder grades for the crux(es). That makes a lot more sense than ‘hardest move’.

This is exactly how I have done my first E2 5B. At the time I led 6b sport so sure I could lead a french 5b..

I did it turns out and it somewhat excellerated me into the E grades

It would add more information so would  lead to a more refined assessment, whether it's needed or not  - probably not!  Sport grades are good for homogenous routes and/or routes of expected difficulty at the grade but are not very good at describing cruxy routes where the rest is much easier but I can live with that. 

Vague memories of a sports climbing guide where a plus on the grade indicated it was a cruxy route, not come across it since anywhere else.

I think the idea was that overall the route fell into a full grade band, 6a 6b 6c 7a whatever but the cruxy move did not justify an upgrade.

[Homer Simpson voice]  Neeeeeerrrrrd!

Joking aside, I'm not on board with this.  One of the joys of sport climbing for me is that journey of discovery - you start up a route with just a brief (sometimes slightly cryptic) description and an indication of overall difficulty, and then all of the facets you've described reveal themselves to you as you climb, like a little story that unfolds as you ascend, the rock revealing its secrets.  It's a lovely experience for me.  

Taking all the joy out by reducing it  all to some overly complicated code?  Not for me thanks.

Pointless anyway - some of the criteria wouldn't really give you enough info - sure there might be a super long round out, but it's on an easier section with good holds.  Angle being high or low is pointless info if you don't know what they holds are like. 

Quality of bolts?  Surely there's only two possible answers here - sound, and to be trusted 100% or unsound, in which case you ought to not climb it.  This is sport climbing, you're meant to be able to take falls.

If that were true, my post wouldn't have had any words in it at all

I've done most of my sport climbing in recent years either in

(a) the Frankenjura, where the topo shows you exactly how distressingly few bolts there are, or 

(b) Greece, where if the pitch is longer than about 30 metres you take as many quickdraws as you can scrounge/carry

Things are improving. At least most guidebook teams take lower grades much more seriously these days. I'd say Eastern grit is pretty much there already. 

I'd say what you can't sensibly include is inexperience but that applies equally well if climbers are stronger and starting out at mid-grate (or pushing grades quickly). That's why some teams list routes (eg the smiley face routes for low prang potential and nothing too weird in movement)

It's always worth emailing me (or Lynn via me) about specific problems as we've tons of experience with lower grade climbers and leaders and target climbing such sandbag routes (and take reach issues seriously) and have a good feel for averages across styles and rock types. I specifically post on the logbooks these days on our views on others I trust post as sandbags.  North Wales is the place we've climbed most outside gritstone areas. We give all routes tech grades to indicate similar quality of information from the grade that a VS would get.

Apologies for the thread hijack, as really the OP is dealing with harder rputes but I think this is important and there is still much room for improvement in parts of the UK.

Did think after I posted that maybe your post was tongue in cheek, but then figured it's far from being most ridiculous suggestion I've seen on here!

But then that's the mark of good satire isn't it?!  Almost indistinguishable from the thing which it's satirising, so fair play to you sir! [polite demonstrative raised-hand clap]

Because I grew up on British tech grades for boulder problems I'll often use them when discussing sport route cruxes.

It may not have been called for as a change or addition to the sport grading system, but it has certainly been thought about. I've often found myself estimating UK tech grades for single moves on sport routes, both in my own head and when describing them to other climbers (climbers to whom it would mean something, of course; i.e. experienced UK tradders). It's potentially useful information which can't be deduced with any precision from the sport grade alone.

To be honest, I've never quite understood this argument. "About equally useful at lower grades" I can buy, but surely not _more_ useful. Do these people have infinite lactic acid tolerance or what?

Related to the original question - do trad climbers outside the UK look enviously at our wonderful grading system and wish they could get it to catch on in their own country? Or are they baffled by our stubborn refusal to switch to a sensible and universal grading system?

How often do you see people failing at low grade trad routes because they got thoroughly pumped and fell off a move that was no harder than a lot of moves they'd already succeeded at? I reckon it's way more common on low grade trad routes to see people back off, rest or hang around until too pumped to continue because they hit a particular stopper move* that they either couldn't figure out or couldn't commit to above gear. I think that's where the tech grade shines at low grades and possibly is actually more useful than a full route grade. Because it's rare at those grades to have long sustained sections without rests available, so you're more likely to be able to reach the crux(/es) pretty fresh and it makes more sense to consider it in isolation.

*Or sequence, because there's some debate as to whether it really is strictly a single move or short sequence.

I don't think many foreign climbers would have experienced the system enough to fully appreciate its benefits, given how different it is and how poorly it translates directly to other grades. Enough British climbers still seem to get pretty confused by it!

To inherit and get used to using a long-established grading system, which is in all the guidebooks, and which works fine for the range of grades in which the overwhelming majority operate? It just a natural, line-of-least resistance path followed by UK trad climbers - I don't believe there's a stubborn refusal going on, just an adherence to the status quo. After all, all such a system needs to do in order to remain in use is work tolerably well, not be perfect. This is not hard to understand: there are plenty of parallels which could be drawn from other walks of life; so anyone professing bafflement is cordially invited to think about it a little more

If the hard moves are generally climbed fresh from a good rest, doesn't the overall (sport) route grade basically just tell you how hard the hardest move is anyway? Unless I'm missing something then if an HS is F4 then it's probably not sustained so it's probably got a UK 4b crux (going by a random conversion table, bear with me, I don't have enough experience of sports grades to check this against my own feel for the relative difficulties) but it might just have a UK 4a crux at the end of a shortish sequence that makes it feel about the same difficulty as a 4b move would in isolation. And I care more about how hard a move feels in practice than how hard it would feel in isolation, so the sports grade seems at least as good if not marginally more useful.

(Again, I'm not arguing that it needs to be changed, just that the reason for not changing it is "it's not really worth the effort" not "it's actually less informative"...)

Yeah, I know that really, I was just phrasing it from the point-of-view of an ignorant foreigner...

Well, no. A route could be cruxy, or it could be sustained at a lower tech grade, and the sport grade alone would not tell you which. You would not know if there was a stopper move or not.

Because most trad is on-sight (or at least flashed) and people generally don't like to fail(*), knowing about stopper moves in advance is more important than in sport climbing where failing is part of the redpointing process and you can practice getting past cruxy moves.

(*) It's also generally harder to retreat and retrieve kit from a trad route than a sport route.

The point that I was responding to was specifically talking about cruxy routes (on the basis that easy trad routes tend to be cruxy, or at least, tend to have good rests between the hard moves). If you have two cruxy routes but one has a 4b crux and the other has a 4c crux then I'd expect the 4c to have a higher "overall physical difficulty" grade as well, so I don't see why a tech grade is really more use in that situation, given that I'm already assuming that they're cruxy.

In general, I'm also not sure why if I'm trying to onsight a low grade trad route I'd particularly care about something which is a "stopper move" in isolation but not be worried about a sequence of moves which is too hard for me when taken collectively. "I could do it if I had a rest first" isn't much of a consolation. In fact I'd probably find the pumpy sequence more offputting because it's less likely that I'd be able to reverse to the nearest ledge / rest / good gear if I realized I was out of gas.

Again, British grades are fine but I don't buy the argument that they're actually somehow better than the alternatives. And sorry again to people who don't like grade pedantry.

A marginally less academic point - one side effect of using sport grades to represent the physical difficulty of trad routes would seem to be that you can directly compare what you can climb on bolts vs what you can climb on trad gear without faffing around with dubious conversion tables. Would this impact the mental game, particularly for more punterish climbers? "Sure the gear's not great, but when was the last time I fell off a 5b" or whatever?

Frankly for the big majority of us normally operating at E1 or below I think UK tech is way more likely to be accurate than sport grades (based on a massive experience base and well tested on modern databases like UKC logbooks... especially on comments that the grade is likely wrong from trusted climbers). We used to have bigger consistency issues with low grade trad but in my experience that is much worse now for low grade sport, thanks mainly to soft indoor grading and failure to upgrade (especially in some overseas areas) for polish. It's not helped by Rockfax conversion tables, linking onsighting 'safe' trad grades vs sport, being b*llox: best to add about two grades to (an unpolished) sports grade for a fairer comparison. 

In the US, where this happens explicitly, I wouldn't climb X rated routes above 5.4 ( unless gear was obvious and henve the X rating clearly wrong) but I did lead into the 5.10s on PG grades.

Sure, but we're talking hypothetical exercises here. If I was actually going to try to convince all UK trad climbers to go over to using sport grade plus danger grade or adjectival grade plus sport grade in order to realize some marginal benefit then merely sorting out the consistency of low-grade sport grades would probably be a nice warmup canter.

John is having some fun.  He knows some early sport routes got trad grades  (and why that ended), some sportingly bolted routes still do, and people will never stop providing  sport and Font grades to harder trad headpoints (as it's useful information).

The more serious trad grading responsibility is at lower grades, where poor grading and/or route descriptions, alongside inexperience and ledges to hit in a fall can add unacceptable additional risk and put people off trad climbing.

Similar issues once applied to lower grade bouldering: in the BMC definitives some say using V grades was a mistake but in reality pretty much any wad or regular punter could easily translate to Font but arguably no-one knew what sub f5 grades actually meant back then. In YMC grit they got round that by equating a Yorkshire version of Font to single move crux UK tech equivalents at lower grades ( eg f3+ ~ UK tech 4b).

Universal grading system, you say 🤔 

It was all E5 6b, like an adjustable spanner it fits just about everything, till you need a bigger spanner