How I grade the hardest trad routes

Now a while ago I got a string of messages telling me that I've climbed E13. Oh god just saying that out loud makes me cringe. But that reminded me that I wanted for a long time to make a video on how I actually grade hard trad routes. So it goes without saying really that I have not climbed E13 or anything close to it. I don't think anyone has. I think if I've climbed E11 in my climbing career I've maybe done it once or twice and I've only scraped into that grade. So why do I think that given that I was the person who first ever applied the grade of E11 to any route in the world with Rhapsody way back in 2006. And then two years later I did Echo Wall on Ben Nevis which was a harder route for me. That's maybe the key word. So at that time when I did Rhapsody, the first E11, I was kind of already way out on a limb with respect to grading. You know when I started climbing in the late 90s the hardest route in the country was Requiem which was graded E7. And actually it was through myself traveling to other countries and repeating E7s and E8s in places like the Lake District on Mountaintrad and Gritstone in the Peak District and in North Wales. And then coming back to my own country I was thinking I think Requiem could be actually an E8 and so therefore it would have been the first E8 in Scotland. So then I started to add some new E8s in Scotland myself. Then I did the first E9 in Scotland in 2001, the first E10, the first E11 and then I climbed Echo Wall. And you know just because a route is harder doesn't necessarily mean it's a grade harder and especially in trad grades there's quite a big gap between the When you go from E8 to E9 it's like going 8B to 8C. It's a jump of two grades so there's a lot of room in it. So I'd done this E11 Rhapsody and then I did Echo Wall. Was I really going to climb five grades harder than the established standard when I started climbing? No. To be totally honest I was not even stronger as a climber than Dave Cuthbertson who climbed Requiem way back in 1983. I definitely was not five grades better. I did have a few advantages like you know the technique and tactics of head pointing had really been refined and I learned a lot from the era of hard grit and gritstone climbing of getting these routes totally dialed and applying a kind of bouldering and sport climbing approach and then plugging it back into bold trad. So those changes in tactics offered me a bit of an advantage but not a five grade advantage. I was beginning to get that uneasy feeling that many good trad climbers sometimes get when they're going well and doing hard new routes and thinking am I really that much better than everyone else that everyone else is climbing E8s and E9s and I'm going to grade something some ridiculous grade like some people were saying well Echo Wall must be E12. No, no way. One thing that I was definitely keen to avoid was getting myself into a situation where I did several routes that were all slightly harder than the last for me personally but then end up someone else coming along with a totally different perspective and downgrading one or more of my routes. Having your route downgraded can be a bit of a stressful experience especially if it's downgraded by more than one grade. I'll come back to Echo Wall in a minute but I thought generally I should talk about my process of grading hard routes since I've spent my whole adult life grading my own new routes and also repeating other people's. You know grades and trads can be both a source of entertainment for some folk and also a lot of stress for people especially the people doing the actual new routes themselves and I think that my approach to it which I've learned over the years does actually insulate me from not only the controversies but also the stress that goes along with them. I think it's fair to say that grading hard trad routes is one of the more annoying bits of the whole process of new routing. It's not something that I want to spend a lot of time doing but sometimes I do end up spending time on it because it is difficult to pin a wide set of variables which are highly subjective and bring them down to one number. You know other climbers have got their own ways of dealing with hard trad grades and I'm not saying that my way is the right way or the only way it's just what I've settled on and what I'm happy with and I haven't actually seen a better alternative yet. Some climbers at various points over the years have floated the idea of almost like a mathematical calculator to work out and to remove the subjectiveness although I think that tends to end up being counterproductive. For one thing it doesn't remove the subjectiveness because the inputs are subjective. The formula might be mathematical but the inputs remain subjective always and I think this approach can introduce new biases and also make it harder for the climbing scene to self-correct errors in grades if you like. So to explain how the grading works first of all I should talk about some basics. The hazard or risk aspect of a climb is one component one part of what can push an e-grade up. People often call this the danger or risk and that's the term that I'll use for the rest of this episode but of course it's only dangerous if you actually fall off. Seb Grie's famous quote was you know you're trying to do dangerous routes safely but it's often presumed that a route with a really high e-grade must be dangerous because it has the high grade but that's not correct at all. You can have a totally safe well-protected e11. A trad route at any grade can either be totally safe or completely unprotectable depending on its characteristics. So fundamentally the e-grade is a mix of physical difficulty and danger. So why not just have a system that inputs those two variables and bang you're good to go? The answer is because it's just not that simple. So here's example at the easy end of the e-grade. Back in the spring I soloed an e2 5b and it's probably 6a plus sport grade and it has gear. Pretty good gear on the easier first half and okay but space gear on the more difficult upper half so hence that makes up to about e2. But I'd like you to imagine for a second a clone of this route except that there's no gear placements and the route is a de facto solo. So clearly that would earn an additional grade at least. Now imagine that the crux of the route was in the first 10 meters and the rest was only English technical 5a so easier climbing. Now in this case the route might still get you to because even though it's unprotected the crux is within the distance from the ground that's more psychologically tolerable to solo. You can convince yourself that things would not be all that bad if you blew it but as it happens the crux sections of this route start at 15 meters and go all the way to 25 meters in height and there's no kidding yourself on it that height. If you fall off then you're toast. So that's going to make it a really solid e3 and really you need to know even more detail than that because although the cruxes of the route are way up in the no fall zone they're more sustained rather than one single hard move and that might be a bit easier to tolerate in an unprotected situation. So if the route was still 6a plus but instead it was easy for most of its length and then had one distinctly hard move really quite high on the pitch then it might actually be an even tougher prospect again. Still 6a plus but maybe e4 because you've got one really hard and secure move at a great height. So if we just input the 6a plus and the amount of protection the consequences of falling off for the whole climb then we can easily get completely the wrong answer. We might call it an e2 when it's really an e4 or vice versa. It's not that those two pieces of information the physical difficulty and the risk are not useful they definitely are but they're just a starting place to get to the ballpark. We just need more information if we're going to resolve it to a more precise grade and you know some of these details are really difficult to actually define. Here's another example consider two separate climbs which are both 7c in difficulty. One of them is locking between really positive edges and the other is off-balance smearing on rounded holes and squiggly smears but everything else about the climbs is similar. The length, the pitches, the amount and nature of the protection and all those things. The positive crimpy route is likely to get one e grade less. It's an easy route to lean if you will. It's predictable and once you can link the moves once you can probably do it every time assuming you have the mandatory margin of safety that you need on hard leads whereas the latter route on rounded smears and insecure climbing is quite a dangerous prospect. You know you could be feeling really strong and fresh but just make a very slight balance error or a little slip on a squiggly smear and there's no way that you could just pull harder to stay on and that will make it a harder route overall that will maybe make it a whole e grade harder and as you can imagine all of this is difficult to capture in a formula. How do you measure the difference between the character of I don't think you can and the other thing is that different climbers might have quite differing points of view on how big the differences between those two examples would be depending on their individual capabilities and for that reason I think it's actually quite a good thing that there are big gaps between one e grade and the next. It might be useful to think of them as wide bands of rather than really precise increments. I know that some climbers think of this as a problem to be fixed if you like. I've heard tri climbers say that it's problematic that two routes that have the same e grade can feel quite different in difficulty but I think you can also look at this as a benefit since each grade is wide enough to accommodate a fair bit of subjectivity in climbers assessment of difficulties. So for all those reasons I'm currently pretty skeptical that an algorithmic formula would ever do a worthwhile job of deciding e grades and a better job than just plain judgment. A sort of precision mathematical approach to something that's inherently imprecise could actually lead to more arguments and not less. So I've spent a fair bit of time pointing out the problems with how other people grade trad routes and that's very easy to do. You know people do that on internet forums all the time and you know it rarely helps all that but I guess what does help is offering some solutions so I'll try and do that as well. Now it may be kind of old school but my solution to trad grading is very very simple although it's not particularly easy. It's just to go out and climb lots of different trad routes at all different grades. That gives you an appreciation of the additional nuance involved in estimating the difficulty of climbs of lots of different characters. I just don't know of any other effective way to develop an awareness of grades and it lets you refer back in your memory to several climbs with roughly similar characteristics but maybe on different rock types or in different locations or different types of cliff. And when I think of the most prominent examples of routes that have been regraded, usually downgraded, it's been when they've been done by climbers who just haven't done that many climbs of a similar style and that includes myself. And I'll just give you an example of that. There's a route of mine called the Long Hope route on Orkney. Initially I gave that route E10. At one point I actually thought it might even be E11 and then James McAfee came along and did the second descent and downgraded that route to E9. So the character of that route is quite unusual. It has more in common with a big wall really. It's 400 meters long, it has a long approach and the crux pitch is actually right at the very end. It's the final pitch, a 70 meter pitch of 8b and when I was first trying it I actually thought it might be 8b+. The climbing that comes before it, although it's much easier in standard, it's very loose, it's very bold, the rock is quite soft and poor quality in places and it feels very adventurous. So although the climbing standard is not all that high, you're going to use a lot of energy because you've got to be very careful and actually hold on quite hard. So as I was working the climb I had this kind of working hypothesis, if you like, that I would use a lot of energy and I would have to feel that the crux pitch was quite easy in order to have any chance of doing the route. For that pitch alone it felt like it would be hard E9 if not E10 and so I thought that therefore the whole climb would add another grade on top of that. My mistake was that I never upgraded my hypothesis when I got to the end of the process. So when I actually did the route I climbed all the lower pitches and I did indeed feel really tired when I got to the crux pitch and I was expecting to fall. I remember telling Paul Diffley, who was filming me, that I was just going to fall off and I had no chance of getting through the crux but then I did get through the crux. So clearly I actually overestimated the difficulty of the climb and I was able to complete it when I was fatigue and really what I should have done was at that point think all right okay I've overestimated the difficulty actually the route is probably easier but I don't think I would have made that mistake had I climbed more routes of that type. But it's kind of a problem, can we really expect climbers to climb lots of routes in a similar style first before grading some new route or suggesting that grade changes to existing routes? Well I mean I think that is a good idea and something to aspire to and it's also just good for your climbing but if you can't manage that and you end up getting a grade wrong like I did then it's not really a big deal. You know when Kaaf repeated the Long Hope route and downgraded it to E9 I didn't beat myself up about it you know I thought about it for about 10 minutes and I realised he's probably correct. You know someone like Kaaf who is right at home on those lower pitches can probably work his way through them without actually getting all that tired and you know he considered the sport grade of the Crux pitch to be E8 and therefore a grade of E9 is probably correct as well. So overall if I get grades wrong which I have done in the past and will do in the future I don't really beat myself up about it. The only time where I feel like I want to correct course is if my grading errors are consistently in one direction. You know I've had some of my routes being downgraded in the past, some of my routes being upgraded in the past and most of them stay the same grade and so that makes me feel like I'm kind of over the target. If that wasn't the case and I was having routes downgraded by or the grade changed by more than one grade or it was consistently my routes were being downgraded then I would feel like maybe I've not got it quite right and I need to have a rethink but I definitely would forgive myself for not getting it right every time because it's just inherently difficult and imprecise. Another thing that's kind of come around lately is a few other track climbers have suggested to me that the top E grades have become compressed because of the fear that routes might be downgraded and folk have also directly suggested to me that I'm one of the main reasons for that. In other words they suggest that I'm a bit of a sandbagger. Now I'll let you decide who's right about that but I am yet to be convinced that I'm consistently undergrading routes. For one thing it feels kind of ironic to me that people would feel that I've actually compressed the system given that the hardest route in my country when I started climbing was Requiem and that was E7 and I was the one suggesting an upgrade of that route from E7 to E8 and then I was the first person to offer a grade of E9, E10 and E11 in Scotland. So it feels like I've personally stretched the trial grades out pretty far so it just seems kind of unconvincing to me that I'm also the one compressing the grades. But I do actually have a more important counter argument to that. You know routes with big grades like E9 or above it tends to be the routes that are actually easy for the grade that eventually become popular and over time my feeling is that it's easy to forget why those routes even became popular in the first place and eventually people look at the routes that were once fair for the grade and view them as being hard for the grade because they're more used to repeating the routes that are actually easier. The easy end of a given grade such as E9 and then considering them to be the benchmark. You know I just think that I haven't really seen that many routes that are truly several grades harder than some trad routes that existed 40 years ago. Take a route like Face Mecca on Cloggy that was climbed by Nick Dixon in the 1980s. That was one of the first E9s and I just can't think of many climbers today who are actually capable of repeating that route. Ian Small could probably do it, Julian Lyons could do it but you could probably count on one hand the climbers who would actually repeat a route like that. And so the idea that E12 or E13 exists and E9 is three or four grades off the cutting edge just seems implausible to me. So rather than being compressed I actually worry that the E grades are in places in danger of becoming a bit inflated since we've got a situation where some E10s and E11s are actually easier pickings for young climbers than the old E8s and E9s that were climbed by folks who are now in their 60s. And I readily take some of the blame for that which brings me to an old route of mine, Echo Wall. So I climbed Echo Wall 15 years ago now and it's still unrepeated which is actually embarrassing to me because it's built up this big reputation which is almost certainly not justified. And in part that might be my own fault for not offering the grade of it, you know, for all this time. And sometimes I wonder if I'd just graded the E11 at the time then someone else would have been asked to just go to Benevis and climb it by now. Echo Wall is a really poorly protected route and I think it's fair to say that it's not a route for an inexperienced climber and who doesn't really have an appetite for bold climbing but it can't be that hard for a very simple reason which is that I climbed it. At the time I suggested that it was around 8c on a top rope and it's difficult for me to remember exactly what it was like but with hindsight I doubt it's actually as hard as that. So at that time I was able to go to Margalef and climb 8c if not in a day then usually first go on the second day and I could usually do 8b plus second or third go but it took me a lot more days before I could freely top rope Echo Wall and so hence I thought it must be at least 8c. It actually took me longer to be able to link it on the top rope than I could red point lots of 8c plus sport routes so that kind of makes sense but maybe not. It's more complicated than that. I can see with hindsight that the awkwardness of working a route that doesn't have bolts and also the fact that I was working it with a view to an almost unprotected lead does kind of change it a little bit and in that scenario it may well take longer to work a route which is not actually as hard if you know if it was an actual bolted sport route. I still suspect that Echo Wall is at minimum 8b but possibly 8c might be a little bit generous. It's just hard to know. So I hope you can see that just applying a sport grade is a bit shaky. The fact is it's it's not a sport route and this is where standing back and using experience to give a more rounded judgment actually has more value and probably more accuracy. I think with serious trad routes like this it just makes more sense to think what grade was I really capable of at the time overall. You know I was reasonably bold at that time but not really a full nutter so even a little danger would go quite a long way in my mind. On one hand I don't think I've ever come across an e9 that I couldn't do so I think it's at least e9 as a lower bound of the confidence interval but what about the upper bound? So if, and it's a big if, if Rhapsody is actually e11 then I was probably capable of climbing a little bit harder than that. So if Rhapsody scrapes into the very bottom of e11 then at most in my mind Echo Wall could be a sort of mid-grade e11. So with grading you know you always have this kind of process of homing in on the the number within the confidence interval so you can always identify the kind of upper and lower bound. At some point you've got to take the final step of slapping an actual number on it and you know you do that in the knowledge that that will largely dictate how the route is viewed or indeed climbed by others. So I never did that with Echo Wall and that's probably why it's unrepeated. So let's try and change that. I'm going to suggest Echo Wall is an e10 and with hindsight I just think it can't be that difficult and some viewers might be thinking oh hang on a minute is he also saying that Rhapsody is e10? Well that is possible but that's not what I'm intending. It's perfectly possible for Rhapsody to be e11 and Echo Wall to be e10 and yet Echo Wall be the hardest route that I've climbed. You know climbers are not equally good at climbing in every style and so they might find an easier graded route harder to climb if that makes sense. So when I do new routes these days I think about grading very little and then I just get on with my climbing but isn't that easier said than done? I don't think it is and so I should probably say something about how I actually insulate myself from grading controversies and I would say that it just is a three-step strategy if you like although I don't think about it like that. And the first part you've just seen in action and you know if Echo Wall up on Ben Nevis there is subsequently upgraded to e11 when it gets repeated I mean I don't think it will be but if it is then that won't cause me any pain but the converse isn't true and so is that is that sandbagging or compressing grades? I don't think it is because in all climbing disciplines not just in trad routes tend to be given a high grade quite often much more often the converse and then they're downgraded by subsequent ascensionists and so I think that if you're grading on the kind of leaner side the lower side of the range then that should even things out. And the second part is that I don't link my self-esteem to what grade I've climbed I don't actually link anything to grades. Obviously I'm a professional climber and it's often said that professional climbers rely on grades for their career or even their income but I've always thought that that's quite a shaky strategy for trying to be a professional climber. For one thing like you know all all sorts of things can get in the way of climbing hard grades and not least the whim of someone's opinion who might just find your route not that hard. Grades are one part of being a pro climber and they are important I'm not saying they have no importance but they're just one part of it so you know on like a personal level I feel happy with a climb if I've had to put a lot of effort and focus and commitment into it and you know that for that reason climbing my first E1 was just as satisfying as climbing my first E11 and on a professional level I think how I the primary measure of my success as a pro climber I think is how much help I can be to other climbers to push their own climbing. So I do think that what grade I climb does play some role in that but it's not even the main role and I think the final way that I insulate myself from grading controversies is just to be a little bit careful about which routes that I actually downgrade or get involved in grading debates with. There have been some cases where I do think it's important for me to offer my opinion for example when James Pearson did the Walk of Life and I repeated that I think it was important for me to offer my opinion at that time even though I knew that the big downgrade would be controversial because I think if I hadn't done that then I think trad grades might have got a little bit out of hand and a bit of a bit of a mess. But in some other cases I just skip it and I don't actually say anything even if I feel that a route could do with being one grade lower because at this point I know that there are a handful of people who view me as a harsh grader so really if I downgrade more routes then people might not listen to my opinion and ultimately my opinion as one climber doesn't matter all that much. If a route is overgraded I think usually the correct grade does settle out in most cases in the end so overall I think the e-grading system works fairly well at least in my country although I guess in Scotland we have a lot of trad climbing you know much more so than than other countries. It's not something that causes me a lot of stress and worry these days even though I do lots of new routes including some that are quite high profile and get discussed on the internet. I think grades especially trad grades are always going to be inexact and hard to pin down and I think the best way to cause or contribute to grading controversies is to get really focused on small details and treat them as if they are mathematical realities and conversely I think the best way to solve grading controversies is just to get out and climb a lot routes at the grade that you're trying to get a handle on. I guess that seems a little bit old school!