Pennine Lines w/c 18 September 2023
|| Damp, breezy || Neither here nor there ||
West Side Story, definitive 7b+ that everyone says is 7c || Climber: unknown
|| Focus On... ||
Grades
The weather hasn’t been doing much heavy lifting for me this week on the content front - hot then cool and rainy, then humid. But one thing recent events have reminded me about is the subject of grades. So far on Pennine Lines I’ve manage to avoid this topic, but I think it’s a subject we need to reevaluate our relationship with. It’s also one I could probably write a lot about. Unfortunately, it’s potentially quite boring so I’ll try and keep this short and throw in some pictures.
So to get to the point about grades; TL:DR - we’re doing it wrong, and we’re letting the tail wag the dog.
Grades are one of the things about climbing that we can’t live with, but we can’t live without. They are inevitable to some extent, but we often use them badly, we ask too much of them, and we use them inappropriately. Granted, at best they are a noble attempt to form part of a theoretically democratic dialogue, to convey information usefully, and can give people some form of inspiration and maybe much need validation, provide a lot of talking points over post-climbing drinks in pubs and online. But maybe they hold us back as much as the push us on? At their worst grades are woven deeply into all of the most nefarious aspects of climbing - commercialism, self-promotion, number chasing, publicity stunts, clickbait, cheating and dishonestly. Only once something is measured, mapped and classified can it really be exploited, and all too often grading ends up a crucial cog in the machine of modern commercialism of climbing.
Grinah Stones; a grade-free utopian paradise || Climber: Jon Fullwood
I will introduce at this point a few paragraphs I wrote for the final few pages of Grit Blocs. Interestingly including a page discussing grades at all is one of the few departures I made from the Bleau Blocs format, but I felt I needed to - symptomatic of our obsession with grades in the UK perhaps.
"The thorny topic of grades, a subject we British seem to be obsessed with. We may as well be on an understanding about this – grades are a nonsense at the best of times. In the same way that we can’t achieve any sort of meaningful consensus on what quality means, we also can’t expect too much from the grading system. On the surface it is doomed to fail; we are trying to measure difficulty (which isn’t measurable), we are trying to bench-mark it against some sort of fixed standard (and that standard doesn’t and can’t exist) and expecting it to be a useful piece of information for climbers of all ages, shapes and sizes and in all conditions (fundamentally impossible) and be consistent globally (again … ).
Given the above, it’s a minor miracle that any climbing grading system works at all. And having ridiculed the entire endeavour, I will counter with the suggestion that many of the shortcomings of any grading system can be sidestepped by simply remembering what we are grading, and what it’s for. We’re grading problems – the passages up or along the rock – and we’re doing it so a piece of information exists for someone who’s never been to the crag or doesn’t know the problem. Once you’ve been there and you’re in some way familiar with the problem then the grade’s job is done and you can forget about it.
Put more simply; we don’t grade ascents. ‘I’m taking 7c for that’ – are you? Where are you taking it? It’s still here, because the grade is attached to the problem. The grade is not a measure of performance. It’s not a medal or an achievement, and it can change as soon as a better sequence is found, a hold breaks, or at the whim of the next guidebook writer. If you run five kilometres but it feels really hard one day for some reason you don’t get to say you’ve run six kilometres do you? If that five kilometres felt easy you don’t conclude maybe it was only four kilometres. If we abandon all this ‘taking the grade’ business then things start to make a lot more sense again."
So you could break this down to three points:
- Don’t expect too much from grades
- Remember what they are actually for
- Remember what we’re grading
When we go climbing, we all have our own experiences. These are internal to us, only we experience what we experience in exactly that way - or at least we’ve no means of sharing that internal experience with others to check. But we try anyway, and based on an assumption of commonality with other similar humans. And we’ve created a system whereby we’ve tried to distil a whole nebulous range of potential diverse experiences of diverse individuals on any given climb down to a number. Already this is on shaky ground. And what’s worse is this isn’t a number on a scale with a fixed reference point, like there’s no brass rod in a vault in Paris by which everything else is measured. Nope, the grade exists on a scale which relative to thousand of other climbs (or worse, a number based on one single ascent) and is hence fluid, shifting like sand in the prevailing wind, and self-referential. And then grades only becomes fixed for any given time based on the curation of whoever writes the guide/topo/website/app and their own opinions and experiences. Scientific it ain’t! So yeah, don’t expect too much from grades.
But as it turns out grades don’t actually need to work that well at all if we only make a reasonable demand of them - just give us a fair idea what we’re getting into. Are we pulling the ab-ropes on a sea cliff route which is VS or E4? Clearly less is at stake from a safety point of view when bouldering, but it’s still nice to know if you’re driving to a crag full of beginners’ problems or a crag full of 8c+ desperates. But other than that, at a functional level grades if grades have given us a bit of useful info, if grades have allowed us to achieve the most fundamental job of the climber - to avoid being killed when climbing - then they have done their job. Once you’ve climbed something you now know 10000 times more about the climb than the grade tells you.
Simon's Seat; some things can't be reduced to a number || Climber: Ross Cooper
I suppose if I have a theory on grades at all, it’s if we keep the above in mind we could solve a lot of the perceived problems with grades. Or to start with we could move away from everyone listing their highest grades climbed (or claimed) as part of their Instagram bio as if grades are a collection of medals, which would at least be progress.
I’ll say it again; "The grade is not a measure of performance.”
So if you see me at the crag arguing the toss about a + grade here or there on a boulder problem please remind me about everything I’ve written here, because I’m no saint and I need reminding about the futility of all this as much as anyone. And to be honest, having said all this, if grade chasing gets someone though their boring day job, distracted and daydreaming of going climbing that evening and bagging another E1 or whatever before it gets dark, and gets them through the day with sanity intact then maybe it’s not all bad.
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Recently Through the lens ||
A little bit of Stanage and Raven Tor; always at the forefront of grades, or debates about grades, one way or another.
|| Fresh Prints ||
Two classic gritstone aretes. One rough northern moorland grit at Grinah Stones, the other the green velvet Doll Tor grit this week in the Print Shop.
