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

^"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."

Guess I think of trolls as people who post to provoke arguments or annoy other people.
The "Puppetmaster troll" definition certainly seems to fit some of these threads, where people say silly things or ask silly questions. Not really inflammatory but seems like they have nothing else to do & really aren't posting anything useful or interesting.

Not that my post is particularly useful or interesting either. Maybe that's the point....

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

I think +/- one grade at the low end is par for the course, so that's why I said the ratings are the same.

I don't know why the Trough jumped so much. It is 5.0 with maybe a harder move or two, but I don't think it's 5.4. I'd give it 5.1+ at the most. Maybe someone knows the history of the climb and can explain.

Vampire was originally climbed at 5.9 A3, which I guess is for the expanding flake. Was A3 the hardest aid climbing in 1962?

I don't think it is plus or minus one grade, it is either the same grade or plus one grade---except for the four grade jump of the Trough. I don't think any grade went down.

I don't know about Vampire. When I did the West Face of Sentinel in 1970, there was an A5 expanding flake traverse that is now graded A3. One thing that happened is that some fixed pitons at either end of the flake kept it expanded and so decreased its expansion range. This made it less likely that everything you placed would drop out when you drove the next piton. Another other thing is that folks aren't using pitons for something like this any more, and cams probably don't expand the crack as much as hammering tapered metal wedges into it does. Both of these grade-mitigating effects could have been at work on the Vampire...?