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General Climbing Discussion

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Australian Grading 25-Aug-2009 At 2:10:11 PM WM

Message

On 25/08/2009 mattjr wrote:
> Note also that a "death on a stick" runout 20 and a "wimpy sport climb" with bolts every two metres which is also 20 are not distinguished between in the grading system. Look for the written description.

>The Ewbank system is intended to simply grade the hardest individual move on a climb. The current practice is to make mention of all factors affecting the climber's experience (exposure, difficulty of setting protection or outright lack of protection) in the description of the climb contained in the guide.

All of the above quote is WRONG. It gets annoying how often this chestnut gets trotted out.

what Ewbank actually said was: "Grading takes the following into consideration. Technical difficulty, exposure, protection and other smaller factors. As these are more or less all related to each other, I have rejected the idea of 3 or 4 grades, i.e. one for exposure, one for technical difficulty, one for protection etc. Instead, the climb is given its one general grading, and if any of the other factors is outstanding, this is stated verbally in the short introduction to that climb"

i.e., the Ewbank grade is not the grade of the hardest move on the route, but an overall grade taking all of the factors into consideration. naturally its all been discussed here before.

>(ii) A general description. There are no equivalents of class 1 - class
>4 in the Australian climbing grading (that I know of), all grades being
>assigned to technical rock climbs.

actually, US Class 4 scrambles, and even some class 3 scrambles, can be fricken death defying and in Australian grades can be anything up to about grade 8-10 in my experience.

> the limit for weekend climbers appears to be 23-24. (5.11d)

this is way off. there's a lot of weekend warriors sending 27-29. admittedly, employment is like kryptonite to a certain relapsed mexican

>An example is Bundaleer (Vic), where the climbing is very steep, and quite intimidating.

?? 95+% of bundaleer routes are vertical! if you want steep go to millennium, muline, etc etc