What is "5" as in "5.10", anyway?

Why a "5" ? Was there ever a 4 , 3, 2, 1 or 0? Why was 5 chosen as opposed to any other number?

Edit: why not pick a "10" from the getgo? It is a nicer rounder number. Then we could have 10.10! I could say " I climb 10.10" , which would be super rad and just rolls off your tongue better.

In order: Because 5 is after 4. Yes. Because it is after 4.

Pick up any hiking or climbing book and read. As per usual there is a reason for everything.

The "5" is for "fifth class" climbing. Which is then broken down into increments.

Classes were from 1 to 6, with 1 being fairly flat ground, and, sixth class being direct aid.

Miquella wrote:So why aren't aid routes graded 6.1 etc.? Instead of A1? Never heard of a trail graded 3.13.....

The "A" rating became more popular (Tahquitz v Sierra Club or some such).

As folks aid climbed more, and, there were differences in difficulty/risk, the rating system developed to describe those.

Was never a need to parse 1-4 class ratings. Already enough difference in the 1-4 grade spread.

Plus, back then, there wasn't an internet for folks to argue endlessly that some trails were more difficult than others...ha ha.

The evolution of climbing grades is interesting...initially, the Sierra Club probably adopted the French "easy to difficult" type ratings for climbing routes. Then, came up with different "classes" for climbing. The YDS evolved out of that and became the climbing grades we use today.

mountainmadness.com/resourc…

Check out the link and scroll down to the Free Climbing section. It's a nice break down of the classes.

I don't get why people are responding to Miquella's posts. This person signed up for MP today and is posting numerous nonsense questions.

I'd rate this thread a T10 (T for troll....)

Here's a response for anyone, troll or not, who is interested in the origins of the decimal system.

To add to Brian's explanation, the system that gave rise to the now mis-named "decimal system" was the Sierra Club Rock Climbing Section grading system, promulgated in the 1930's. This system was doomed to irrelevance by virtue of grading Sierra routes, not by any sense of intrinsic difficulty, but only indirectly in terms of difficulty and directly by the equipment appropriate to the endeavor. The Sierra Club RCS grades were:

Class 1: Hiking.
Class 2: Proper footgear is necessary for safe climbing.
Class 3: Ropes should be available but will generally not be used. Scrambling with frequent use of hands and moderate exposure.
Class 4: Ropes and belays must be used for safety. Pitons may be required occasionally for anchoring belayers.
Class 5: Pitons required above the belayer to protect the leader. Expansion anchors may occasionally be used for such protection.
Class 6: Pitons or expansion anchors must be used for direct aid.

A fading leftover from these classifications (and indication of how equipment does not directly correlate with difficulty) is the expression "third-classing" for climbing rock of any difficulty unroped.

As rock climbing developed at Tahquitz, it became abundantly clear that "Class 5" didn't provide much information, so the piton-protected climbs were subdivided by the guidebook author, Chuck Wilts, into the levels 5.0 to 5.9, and these numbers referred to difficulty, not equipment. Sometime in the early 60's routes harder than 5.9 were added and the analogy with decimal numerals had to be ditched.

Here's the list of standards as of 1962:

5.0 - The trough
5.1 - Fingertip traverse
5.2 - Frightful variation of the trough
5.3 - East lark
5.4 - Angel's fright
5.5 - Ski Tracks
5.6 - Sahara terror
5.7 - Fingertrip
5.8 - Mechanic's route
5.9 - Open book
5.10 - Added because climbs much harder than 5.9 were being done.

6.1 - Sling Swing Traverse
6.2 - Reach
6.3 - Green Arch
6.4 - Lower Royal's Arch
6.5 - Flakes
6.6 - Super Pooper
6.7 -
6.8 - Vampire
6.9 -

In 1963, Leigh Ortenburger proposed a national climbing classification system (NCCS) the dropped the "5." and compressed a few of the lower grades. This did not catch on. But Ortenburger also proposed A1--A5 to replace 6.0--6.9, which everyone agreed was too many subdivisions for something that changed according to equipment and number of ascents, and added the "overall commitment" I--VI. These grades did find favor with the climbing community.

The same thing that happened with 5.9 started happening with 5.10, and Yosemite climbers further subdivided the existing 5.10's into 5.10a--5.10d. With the added letter grades, what had been the "Tahquitz Decimal System" became the "Yosemite Decimal System" or YDS.

sweet post Rgold.
Can't wait to send my first 6.8!

Do these routes all still exist, with the same ratings (5s, not 6s, obviously)? Could be a fun project to climb them consecutively!

Old lady H wrote:Do these routes all still exist, with the same ratings (5s, not 6s, obviously)? Could be a fun project to climb them consecutively!

Yes, they do, and they still (for the most part) carry the same ratings. There has always been rockfall at Tahquitz in the area of some of the easier climbs, and it may have affected route difficulty.

I find it interesting that Vampire was near the top of the scale (6.8) as an aid climb, even though as a free climb it has the relatively modest grade of 5.11-

PRRose wrote: Yes, they do, and they still (for the most part) carry the same ratings.

Actually, I think most them have been upgraded---at least according to MP. (What do the designers of the system know anyway?) The biggest jump is The Trough, originally 5.0 and now 5.4. But perhaps this is because...

PRRose wrote:There has always been rockfall at Tahquitz in the area of some of the easier climbs, and it may have affected route difficulty.

A few climbs on the list (eg Open Book) stayed the same. Nothing went down.

PRRose wrote:I find it interesting that Vampire was near the top of the scale (6.8) as an aid climb, even though as a free climb it has the relatively modest grade of 5.11-

There isn't ever going to be much correlation between the relative difficulty levels of free and aid gradings. This is even more true when, as in this case, the aid rating is based on the piton selection available in 1962.

FrankPS wrote:I don't get why people are responding to Miquella's posts. This person signed up for MP today and is posting numerous nonsense questions.

Instead of calling them "trolls" I think "puppetmasters" is more like it.

I think its more of an internet fetish.

FrankPS wrote:I don't get why people are responding to Miquella's posts. This person signed up for MP today and is posting numerous nonsense questions.

Looks like our favorite troll Eleanor is back.

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion,[3] often for their own amusement

Not really fair to call this a troll but one wonders why ask a silly question that can be easily answered with a Google search. BUT not really a troll, per the definition above....

cragmantoo wrote:
In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion,[3] often for their own amusement

Not really fair to call this a troll but one wonders why ask a silly question that can be easily answered with a Google search. BUT not really a troll, per the definition above....
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

Close enough, as the strict definition of the term has loosened a bit. I think Eleanor qualifies.

Personally, if I find the question to be interesting and if I think I have something to say, then I'll contribute. I don't care about the intentions of the poster if the question meets those criteria for me.

Folks who scream "troll" (how exactly do they know?) contribute nothing of any use, while keeping the purported troll thread high on the list. The net effect is to collaborate in the perpetuation the troll, if that's what it is, making the troll-warners the real puppets.

Ok, back to content.

The information isn't hard to find with a Google search, but it is possible to miss the full picture. For example, the current descriptions I've seen of the evolution of the YDS system seem to have missed the fact that the original RCS definitions were based on what equipment was needed and so related only indirectly to difficulty. This was the main problem with those grades.

The grades also incorporated assumptions that are far less true today. For example, class four climbing anticipated that the rope would be used for protection, but that there would, in general, be no intermediate protection points and that in general the belayer would be braced, perhaps connected to a natural anchor, but only occasionally attached to a piton anchor. The absurdity of trying to correlate this kind of description with a level of difficulty should be evident.

rgold wrote:Personally, if I find the question to be interesting and if I think I have something to say, then I'll contribute. I don't care about the intentions of the poster if the question meets those criteria for me. Folks who scream "troll" (how exactly do they know?) contribute nothing of any use, while keeping the purported troll thread high on the list. The net effect is to collaborate in the perpetuation the troll, if that's what it is, making the troll-warners the real puppets.

Rich, you have posted useful content for years, which I and others appreciate.
But I fear that Elena alienates many of those she entangles in her idiotic controversies and then we don't know what contributions we lose from them when they lack your patience and perspective. She is also fairly misogynistic and homophobic and I hate to see that attitude on MP.

But frankly, I don't really care that much. Why would you object to folks pointing out the obvious, that she is a troll and is present again?

Edited to add-

A question more relevant to this thread- did the Sierra Club scale come from Welzenbach's rating scale? Or do you think it arose independently? I don't think Welzenbach started his lowest rating at the difficulty level of trails. Pretty sure his grade 1 was similar to UIAA I, but maybe this is just an assumption on my part.

Googled a bit and found this on Wikipedia (thanks Aubrey!)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(climbing)

In 1894, the Austrian mountaineer Fritz Benesch introduced the first known grading system for rock climbing. The Benesch scale had seven levels of difficulty, with level VII the easiest and level I the most difficult. Soon more difficult climbs were made, which originally were graded level 0 and 00. In 1923, the German mountaineer Willo Welzenbach compressed the scale and turned the order around, so that level 00 became level IV-V. This "Welzenbach scale" was adopted in 1935 by French mountaineers like Lucien Devies, Pierre Allain and Armand Charlet for routes in the Western Alps and finally in 1947 in Chamonix by the Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme. It prevailed internationally and was renamed in 1968 as the UIAA scale. Originally a 6-grade scale, it has been officially open-ended since 1979.

Mark, I don't exactly object, and there are of course people who really are trolling. By far the best thing to do is to ignore them, because anything else actually serves their purposes. I'm not saying anything that isn't well-known already.

Meanwhile, the propensity to shout "troll" affects a hell of a lot of innocent questions from people who simply don't know much and come here to find out. I think it speaks poorly for the climbing community to demean these folks on the basis of some unsupportable hunch. I prefer innocent until proven guilty.

And finally, if someone intending to troll accidentally posts something of genuine interest, why not discuss it?

Species- Troll.

Subspecies-

Artistic Troll: “A higher species of Classic Troll, Artistic Trolls are intelligent individuals who understand the subtle art of trolling, and who do what they do specifically to make others look foolish. Often employing the techniques of Deceptive Trolls, Artistics will string forumites along until some point in time designated by their own desires, at which point they will reveal the ploy, admit that it was a ploy, and laugh at everyone for being stupid enough to fall for it.”

Crazy Troll: “This guy just makes no sense. You post something about gardening and he claims that all gardeners are women and all women are soul-sucking incubus. Incubi? Who are only out to lure men into bed so they can marry them, then divorce them and take all their money to buy more tomato plants and meth.”

Playtime Trolls: “An individual plays a simple, short game. Such trolls are relatively easy to spot because their attack or provocation is fairly blatant, and the persona is fairly two-dimensional.” ipredator.co/troll/

I named this one the Puppetmaster Troll: This person loves to hit up sites where certain people lurk all day waiting to answer n00b questions and takes great pride in getting those certain people to waste as much time as possible writing a long winded response to inane questions. This subspecies of troll is often successful in life and actually has an active life and only uses the internet to fuck with people.