At what point can we just update a retro-graded route?

Eliot Augusto wrote:So who's definition of 5.9 should we go off of? 

Duane Raliegh.......

I know exactly what you mean. I just did a WI4 yesterday and it was definitely more like M6! The guidebook gave it a WI rating but there was like zero ice on the thing.

What's the big deal of maintaining an old, out of date sandbagged rating.  Ratings have evolved and become more uniform due to Mountain Project and the like, consensus ideology,  as opposed to the ratings of the past described above, by JNE.  When the YDS system came out, we were still using the B system for bouldering and thanks to John Sherman, that too evolved.  I understand being sentimental, but read the 'history' portion of your guidebook, they are often quite interesting and insightful.  Having said that, let's change the grades that may be skewed, so that grades can serve their intended purpose, and that is to inform the climber what they are getting themselves into with any given climb.  History in all aspects has its place, however in my humble opinion, grading is not one of those.

In my local area, there is a 5.9 trad put up in the late 1970's. At the time, it was one of the hardest routes. The FA is a friend of mine, and he is curious to this day, to see it climbed by a current day climber, and how they manage it. No anchors, no bolts, a difficult climb to figure out how to belay, especially without old school skills at topping out, and, yes, giving a stance based belay from above. It is not on MP, and I hope it never will be. It is rarely climbed. That sort of puzzle needs to stay, for future climbers to "discover" over and over. And yes, my partner and I figured it out, but neither of us climbed the crux. 

I've also climbed at Hells Canyon, delightfully void of much beta of any kind. Hike up, suss it out. Ditto for a back country sport area. Sure, the "easy" climbs were definitely easy....but. The rock was very sharp, tons of stuff to get a rope totally sliced on. Suddenly that 5.6 became really thought provoking, even on top rope.

City of Rocks (Castle, actually)? Same thing. That easy lead? A rope stretcher if you had a 60, as in climb up the start to have enough rope to tie in. Also with a huge crevasse you had to get across almost at the top. Yikes, but, fun!!!

Where I am stuck? What grade do I tell people I can climb? I don't, as I can't. The best I can do is tell them more about myself, and what to expect if we climb together. Our local rock is a huge challenge, still, yet I sailed up a climb at City last season, when I discovered sticky rubber actually....sticks! Who knew?

I vote for leave "old school" as is. The discovery is a big part of it. Don't take that away. Besides, it is also our shared history, to be protected for the future. You might just as well argue for more roads in national parks, or allowing roads  in wilderness, to accommodate the hoards. Some things just need to be left difficult and inconvenient.

Best, Helen (old school climber trapped in an old lady, lol!)

JNE wrote:

The 'historical ratings' are often the original suggestion for the rating of the climb, and they are often a suggestion made with no real basis of comparison.  Many of the old guys were just like people today, and lacked the time and resources to run out and compare/contrast a new line with a buch of established and concensus graded climbs.  As a result these people often chose a lower grade over a harder grade, and through community non-sequiter reasoning these suggestions have transmogrified into 'benchmarks'.  I think it is unwise to take these 'historical ratings' as anything other than poorly informed suggestions, even in the context of their paticular time in the world.  This is true especially in light of the fact that sticky rubber showed up sometime while all this was happening, as did cams, narrow-toed shoes, hightops which still have a sporty toe for edging/narrow cracks, myraid tiny nuts to protect any tiny seam, a greater proliferation of bolts, etc, and these things effect both the actual as well as the percieved difficutly of climbs.

Another contributing factor is that the philosophy of grading has changed over the years.  Until fairly recently people generally thought there was a unique grade which could be assigned to each and every climb, and the experienced climbers (the 'old guard') of any given time thought/think they knew/know that if there was not a large enough jump between grades the idea of a unique grade for every climb just does not work out.  At the same time, people who are actually going out and climbing regularly, and actively trying to improve, notice that these grades the 'old guard' has left them are still inaccurate in that one grade still bleeds into another (so there is no clear distinction between grades), and people still interpret the relative difficulty of climbs differently, leading to annoying grade debates and even more annoying (to the point of being socially punishable IMO) accusations of 'look at me' attitudes.  

Now, since the 'old guard' presumably designed their grading system specifically to avoid these things, the people who were going out and climbing regularly threw most of what these people said out the door and started out with a philosophically new grading system in which the jumps between grades were discernible for any individual as opposed to every individual.  i.e. any one person can tell the difference between 10a and 10b, but any given communtiy of climbers may be unable to reach a wide concensus about which particular climbs are 10a and which are 10b, and this is due to physical differences between people.  I argue this is what the a,b,c,d subdivisions within the YDS were for and why the French scale is the way it is, with +'s, -'s, and a,b,c subdivisions, even if the climbers who made these choices were not specifically thinking in terms of morphological differences between climbers.  

Fast forward to today and the debate has evolved to the point that many people now think the right way to approach grading is to assign some kind of finely gradiated individual grade which then gets averaged into something with far fewer nodes of distinction for the community grade. i.e. five people grade a climbing challenge as follows: 5.1, 4.5, 4.3, 5.2, 4.9, which averages to 4.8, which is then just graded as 4 in the community system.  In the case of a climb with recorded grades as follows: 5.1, 4.9, 5.5, and 4.1, 3.9, 4.5 would get 4/5 with a brief description of the physical situation which brings that about (i.e a long crux move or a tiny finger slot for the crux, or whatever else).  

My point was grades matter very little -- it's the experience that counts (and in that, less is more).

Yes, there are historical reasons grades differ from place to place, but these simply preserve the overall character and history of their respective areas.

I did quite enjoy the line about "annoying grade debates" in the midst of 4 paragraphs on why an even more complicated grading system is justified, though.

I'm a relatively new climber (2.5 years) and I love the old school hard routes. Jumping on a 9+ from the 60s is a guaranteed good time! It has also given me mad respect for the back in the day climbers, they deserve it!

bridge wrote: I did quite enjoy the line about "annoying grade debates" in the midst of 4 paragraphs on why an even more complicated grading system is justified, though.

You misunderstood the post then.  That post was a historical explanation of our current grading system and how it came to be.  I in no way suggested a new system, just that we use the one we have with full disclosure of how/why it was designed and used up to now.  

You should visit HP40. They update their guidebook every year and the only major change is normally lowering the grade of a few routes.

ViperScale . wrote: You should visit HP40. They update their guidebook every year and the only major change is normally lowering the grade of a few routes.

That is not a bad way to go IMO, especially if it is to keep the grading consistent in response to changes in technology.  Think about Boreal Fires (pronounced fee-ray), the first sticky rubber shoes.  I would imagine the climbs which were effected to the degree that they experienced a relative change in grade (here relative is to the climbs which were largely/entirely unaffected, like hand cracks and wider) were slabs and thin cracks.  I am unsure of to what extent the ratings on these climbs were adjusted when this occurred, but I imagine it was inconsistent at best and as a result 'historical grades' lost a great deal of consistency with the introduction of Fires.  The same thing has happened with many other technologies.  If these climbs had been consistently downrated when new technology (or beta, or a hold breaking, or anything) made them relatively easier, 'historical grades', at least ones which were done in light of the other climbs of their era, would indeed be a reliable benchmark as opposed to a neat historical footnote.

JNE wrote:

That is not a bad way to go IMO, especially if it is to keep the grading consistent in response to changes in technology.  Think about Boreal Fires (pronounced fee-ray), the first sticky rubber shoes.  I would imagine the climbs which were effected to the degree that they experienced a relative change in grade (here relative is to the climbs which were largely/entirely unaffected, like hand cracks and wider) were slabs and thin cracks.  I am unsure of to what extent the ratings on these climbs were adjusted when this occurred, but I imagine it was inconsistent at best and as a result 'historical grades' lost a great deal of consistency with the introduction of Fires.  The same thing has happened with many other technologies.  If these climbs had been consistently downrated when new technology (or beta, or a hold breaking, or anything) made them relatively easier, 'historical grades', at least ones which were done in light of the other climbs of their era, would indeed be a reliable benchmark as opposed to a neat historical footnote.

I guess you have never climbed there. The routes they have downgraded have gotten harder over time but the grades were lowered. When a friend of mine who climbs V8 outdoors can no longer climb what used to be a V5 that got downgraded to a V4 now there is a problem (we both have climbed the problem years ago but neither of us can do it anymore).

Old lady H wrote: In my local area, there is a 5.9 trad put up in the late 1970's. At the time, it was one of the hardest routes. The FA is a friend of mine, and he is curious to this day, to see it climbed by a current day climber, and how they manage it. No anchors, no bolts, a difficult climb to figure out how to belay, especially without old school skills at topping out, and, yes, giving a stance based belay from above. It is not on MP, and I hope it never will be. It is rarely climbed. That sort of puzzle needs to stay, for future climbers to "discover" over and over. And yes, my partner and I figured it out, but neither of us climbed the crux.

I've also climbed at Hells Canyon, delightfully void of much beta of any kind. Hike up, suss it out. Ditto for a back country sport area. Sure, the "easy" climbs were definitely easy....but. The rock was very sharp, tons of stuff to get a rope totally sliced on. Suddenly that 5.6 became really thought provoking, even on top rope.

City of Rocks (Castle, actually)? Same thing. That easy lead? A rope stretcher if you had a 60, as in climb up the start to have enough rope to tie in. Also with a huge crevasse you had to get across almost at the top. Yikes, but, fun!!!

Where I am stuck? What grade do I tell people I can climb? I don't, as I can't. The best I can do is tell them more about myself, and what to expect if we climb together. Our local rock is a huge challenge, still, yet I sailed up a climb at City last season, when I discovered sticky rubber actually....sticks! Who knew?

I vote for leave "old school" as is. The discovery is a big part of it. Don't take that away. Besides, it is also our shared history, to be protected for the future. You might just as well argue for more roads in national parks, or allowing roads  in wilderness, to accommodate the hoards. Some things just need to be left difficult and inconvenient.

Best, Helen (old school climber trapped in an old lady, lol!)

How about you don't bring a guidebook with you and we can all get what we want.  As for the roads comment, won't up-grading old school climbs actually keep the hoards away? ...not to mention protecting newbies from getting in way over their heads.  This can lead to dangerous situations, injury and potential area closures.  I like adventure and the unknown probably as much as the next, but a guide book should be just that, a guide.  

ViperScale . wrote:

I guess you have never climbed there. The routes they have downgraded have gotten harder over time but the grades were lowered. When a friend of mine who climbs V8 outdoors can no longer climb what used to be a V5 that got downgraded to a V4 now there is a problem (we both have climbed the problem years ago but neither of us can do it anymore).

That sounds ridiculous then, and no, I have never climbed there.  I have heard that many of the eastern US climbing areas have a reputation for stiff grades, and from what I understand this has been mostly attributed to a combination of sometimes excessive humility on the FAists part in addition to a lack of resources/desire to go compare/contrast the lines to concensus grades.

In the cases where comparing/contrasting was done, it would be interesting to know if the comparison was with an older hand crack or wider climb, an old friction dependent line which was not updated to reflect its relative grade change upon the introduction of Fires, or an old friction line interpreted for difficulty pre-Fires.

Jake Jones wrote: Who is we?  YOU can at any point.  Just lobby the publishers, developers and FAs for any area to stay in line and stop this dreadful sandbagging once and for all.  Godspeed.

What are you on about?

Fitz wrote:

 ...not to mention protecting newbies from getting in way over their heads.  This can lead to dangerous situations, injury and potential area closures.  I like adventure and the unknown probably as much as the next, but a guide book should be just that, a guide.  

I really don't think changing the grades of classic routes will protect new climbers.  Most new climbers are not just starting out leading trad.  Chances are they got to the point that they are leading trad like the rest of us, they either started following a bunch of trad, climbing in the gym, or started sport climbing.  By the time any climber starts leading trad they should be around the sport of climbing long enough to know grades can vary wildly from area to area, and especially at areas that were developed prior to the 80's.  

Honestly, can anyone on this thread think of a single trad leader they know personally that is a competent trad leader, but also so oblivious to climbing areas, history, and grades, that they don't know grades vary from area to area.

Point being, that if an accident occurs, it's not simply caused by a number in a guide book.  It's caused by a lack of:  preparation, knowledge, willingness to back down, realistic view of ability, self awareness, etc.  Or just shit luck.   

As for a guide book being "just that, a guide".  The guide book IS a guide.  A guide TO THAT SPECIFIC AREA, thus reflecting the locally accepted grade.

K. Le Douche wrote:

I really don't think changing the grades of classic routes ...

.

You realize that when Fires came out, the grades of (some) classic routes were changed by the community by virtue of not having been appropriately downgraded, right?

jason oliphant wrote: well I'm sure the broader community doesn't seem to be too bothered by this..
but I'm sympathetic to your POV, ska.

as a n00b.  my feeling is that sandbagged routes defeat the whole purpose of even Having a grade in the first place.

suppose I was driving into a new road in SE new york; all the sudden a cop comes striding out.
" whats going on officer, I was going 50 in a 55mph."

"oh, well that was the 50mpH in the 1980's.  Everyone has adjusted their speedometer for the new era.
BUT-unfortunately for you- we live by the OLD rules and you owe a $150 traffic ticket"

it would suck, right?  and worse for a n00b.  being on a route outside of one's ability could cost one his/her life.

I'm a chemist and I standardize ALL my numbers I don't arbitrarily inflate the numbers a few years later because I make more measurements.  why does the climbing community?
----
anyways, if you've climbed the Route- espacially routinely
why not just assign your own estimate of its difficulty-  why do you have to blindly follow the climbing community's assigned rating??

if You've climbed the route, then really the rating isn't such a big deal.

it just seems like a bigger deal for someone like me, a beginner, that Might be able to do a 5.8 But NOt at the Gunks (apparently)- where a 5.8 is not easy at all.

Not the same.

Catering to the new generation ofClimbers who want their Proj to be harder than the think is lame.
Imagine you are driving your Prius to the local crag and you realize it tops out at 88mph before you go back in time. But since you don’t reach the 88mph required to time travel, you cry on mountainproject until someone grades High e 5.12c so you can spray on Instagram to get a protein supplement sponsor to help qualify for the Olympics. 
Take the approach surfers use for waves of Some gyms grading system to jump on climbs.
Prime reason new people get hurt and the inability to learn basic self rescue techniques 

Fitz wrote:

How about you don't bring a guidebook with you and we can all get what we want.  As for the roads comment, won't up-grading old school climbs actually keep the hoards away? ...not to mention protecting newbies from getting in way over their heads.  This can lead to dangerous situations, injury and potential area closures.  I like adventure and the unknown probably as much as the next, but a guide book should be just that, a guide.  

City of Rocks has an excellent guidebook, thanks to Dave Bingham. I AM a new climber, and literally every single place we've gone to date has surprised us, one way or another, even with a guidebook and as much beta as could be gathered. Anything from just eyebrow raising to sketch as hell. Anyone who thinks they are ready to climb outside has to be aware that it is always possible to run into surprises, and should expect that. Changing the grade will only erase history and not make anyone any safer, in my opinion Some grades will change over time, anyway, as authors and consensus moves those grades, but please don't advocate that in general (last more addressed to the group than you, Fitz).

And, I would add, every story but one I cited in my earlier post was referring to sport routes. Even more of a "menace" to us noobs. Horrors!

If you need more beta, then look at places where you can find that information, or ask around. The 'old school' is just that: old. And limited. That part of our climbing will never happen again. Personally, I want that connection with those people who created our sport. Many are still around, after all. Please, let's not "retro" anything them out of existence. If it was put up last century, or last week, it is up to us, ultimately, to gauge if we should be on the thing at all.

Best, OLH

JNE wrote:

You realize that when Fires came out, the grades of (some) classic routes were changed by the community by virtue of not having been appropriately downgraded, right?

Never heard of "Fires" so I'm not sure what you're referring to.

So if you are for changing classic grades, what would you, for example, like to see High E at the Gunks (5.6), or Calypso in Eldo(5.6) changed to?  Do you know anyone who climbs at the Gunks or Eldo, and doesn't realize the grades are, to say the least stiff? 

I'm not saying that a route should not be subject to community consensus for a grade.  But if a route like High E has been "5.6" for the past, what 40-60 years, and is now seeing its 3rd or 4th generation of climbers, I don't see the point in changing it.  It's a historical grade, everyone knows it's "sandbagged" according to today's grades.  Just my personal opinion, but I rather enjoy getting on old routes that were put up in hiking boots with old gear, and just imagining how those guys did what they did back then.  It's fun, it's educational, and the historical grade is just a nod to that generation.
I also don't think there is a large community desire to change historical grades.  Yes, everyone agrees they're hard for the grade, but most people would not wish to see that grade changed.  I think most capable climbers see the grade as historical, and respect that.  20 years from now, when everyone is gym bred, maybe that community desire will change. 

Old lady H wrote:

...Changing the grade ...

Best, OLH

Again, by and large, when people suggest 'changing the grades' to 'get rid of the sandbags' it is a reference to the inconsistencies brought about by the changes to grades which already took place decades ago by inconsistent as well as non-existent downgrades of at the time existing climbs which were made easier by new technologies (such as Fires), but nonetheless were left at their original grades and subsequently referenced by various climbers over the years as legimitate representations of one grade or another, and thus have led to a legitimately overly variable grading scale.

 
Which of note tends to be variable within any given area due to the fact that various new technologies effect the grades of some climbs and not others.  These inconsistencies are then magnified and repeated because the grade for any given climb depends on the reference used for comparison, and because the reference has a huge variability and therefore varies from person to person since people do not have identical tick lists (and likes/dislikes), therefore people use objectively different measures of various grades even when these measures are entirely constructed from climbs within the same area.  

These inconsistencies just get worse and worse because people who cross over styles while putting up new lines tend to rate things consistently within the context of their experience (considering they account for morphological differences between themselves and the FAists), and therefore the variability of say, fist cracks, grows over time.  Furthermore, the fact that this is the way things currently are is in no way any kind of rational or well thought out argument for grades (or measurement of any kind) being inherently inconsistent and therefore overly subjective (or incomprehensible), nor is arguing that grades should be adjusted to account for past errors due to lack of correcting for new technology in any way arguing that you should be able to wander around the world will nilly and when anything bad happens, fail to be able to take personal responsibility.

I think they meant Boreal Fires aka sticky rubber shoes (do correct me if I am wrong)