5 ms·

5.12 is a grade that someone needs to be fairly dedicated and skilled to achieve. 5.13 is something that very few dedicated climbers will get to. 5.14 is elit

5.12 is a grade that someone needs to be fairly dedicated and skilled to achieve. 5.13 is something that very few dedicated climbers will get to. 5.14 is elite territory and you are in the top few percent of climbers world wide. 5.15 is like climbing glass, hung at a 45 degree overhang. the dawn wall has 7 pitches of 5.13 climbing and 7 pitches of hard 5.14 climbing... plus "filler" 5.11 and 5.12 climbing for the other 20ish pitches. I have been climbing for years and have only climbed a handful of 5.12 climbs... it's really, really hard. to say that this is hard is an understatement. edit: the grades came from the YDS which was the yosemite decimal system(actually started at tahquitz before royal robbins went to yos). there are classes of climbing grades where class 1 is walking to get the mail, class 3 is some scrambling but if you slipped you'd be ok usually, class 4 is where you'd probably get really hurt or die if you fell at the wrong time but the climbing is not super hard, class 5 was subdivided into a decimal rating from 5.0 to 5.9. There were climbs in Tahquitz that were the standard of difficulty for these grades. The trough was 5.0(modern 5.4) all the way up to open book which was 5.9 and considered to be the pinnacle of human achievement. After a while humans got stronger, and the equipment got better, and technique got refined so they opened up the YDS to be open ended as it is today with grades greater than 5.9. they initially stuck with whole numbers but eventually they decided that there needed to be a finer grained approach to grading. thus every grade after 5.10 was given a letter grade from a to d. each letter grade is roughly equivalent to a number grade below 5.10(going from 5.8 to 5.9 is roughly equivalent to going from 5.10a to 5.10b in terms of relative increased difficulty) and each letter grade can take months or years to get strong/technical enough to ascend. all this was said to drive home the fact that what they are doing is amazing and defies belief. they are climbing multiple pitches of climbs that are 24 "grades" harder than what was once thought of as the hardest someone could ever climb.

steveax 12y ago
Yeah, and it's more than just the grade too. The Steck Salathe [1] is "only" 5.9, but I suspect it would rebuff ~60% of "5.12 climbers" [1]: http://www.supertopo.com/rock-climbing/Yosemite-Valley-Sentinel-Rock-Steck-Salathe http://www.supertopo.com/rock-climbing/Yosemite-Valley-Senti...
- weaksauce 12y ago
  oh yeah. anytime you look at a grade you have to look at when it was put up first. never trust a valley 5.9 put up in the 50's. also, never trust an old climb that is 5.9+ as that's likely 5.12ish. also, that route is heinously hard with a majority of it being offwidths and runouts. the crux, mandatory free, pitch on it has some really airy 5.9 squeeze chimney with large cams as pro... to the point that the large cams you brought are not big enough so you leave a tipped out #6 and climb for another 50' above it. edit: derp. I was talking about the salathé wall on el cap.
  - Intermernet 12y ago
    Here in Australia we have a similar problem. The local climbers had no international input for quite a few years and the "official" hardest climbs were around grade 21 (on the Ewbank system). Some of those 21s (5.10-ish) have now been upgraded to the high twenties (5.12d - 5.13c-ish). It was really the visit from Henry Barber in 1975 that introduced chalk, and a more gymnastic style, that allowed local climbers to realize that some of the more recent "21s" were actually a lot harder. This visit was a perfect example of why it's important to have global communication and cross-pollination within any niche interest. It accelerates progress immensely. This is why we go to trade-shows and meetups :-)
  - steveax 12y ago
    It's not that the Steck Salathe (and other long traditional climbs) are mis-graded, it's the breadth of competencies required by them.
sveme 12y ago
That's a pretty good summary - though I'm more used to the French and Middle-European scales. As I have been searching for something like that for a while already, do you by any chance have a link to something like a cumulative distribution for fraction of climbers that can do grade x? Something like 90% of all climbers can do 5.9, 65% can do 5.10, 30% 5.11 and so forth? Percentages obviously picked out of thin air. Just out of curiosity as a climber and data nerd.
- Intermernet 12y ago
  Not a distribution, but probably a useful data set, is the first year a particular grade was climbed. http://web.stanford.edu/~clint/yos/hard.htm http://web.stanford.edu/~clint/yos/hard.htm For an approximation of what you're after, I'd recommend comparing number of first ascents of climbs of a particular grade in the last 3 - 5 years. This time frame should include enough data to get a reasonable answer, and won't be too biased by advances in equipment and ability over the last few decades. The Crag (http://www.thecrag.com http://www.thecrag.com) have an API that may be useful for an initial data set (http://www.thecrag.com/article/api http://www.thecrag.com/article/api). Other online resources are http://www.8a.nu http://www.8a.nu and http://www.supertopo.com/ http://www.supertopo.com/ but I don't think they have easily accessible APIs.
- rfergie 12y ago
  http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/graphs.html http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/graphs.html has some stuff and you might be able to scrape the rest. I believe 8a.nu also has some public data on this kind of thing but for a more global population

steveax 12y ago

Yeah, and it's more than just the grade too. The Steck Salathe [1] is "only" 5.9, but I suspect it would rebuff ~60% of "5.12 climbers" [1]: http://www.supertopo.com/rock-climbing/Yosemite-Valley-Sentinel-Rock-Steck-Salathe http://www.supertopo.com/rock-climbing/Yosemite-Valley-Senti...

weaksauce 12y ago
oh yeah. anytime you look at a grade you have to look at when it was put up first. never trust a valley 5.9 put up in the 50's. also, never trust an old climb that is 5.9+ as that's likely 5.12ish. also, that route is heinously hard with a majority of it being offwidths and runouts. the crux, mandatory free, pitch on it has some really airy 5.9 squeeze chimney with large cams as pro... to the point that the large cams you brought are not big enough so you leave a tipped out #6 and climb for another 50' above it. edit: derp. I was talking about the salathé wall on el cap.
- Intermernet 12y ago
  Here in Australia we have a similar problem. The local climbers had no international input for quite a few years and the "official" hardest climbs were around grade 21 (on the Ewbank system). Some of those 21s (5.10-ish) have now been upgraded to the high twenties (5.12d - 5.13c-ish). It was really the visit from Henry Barber in 1975 that introduced chalk, and a more gymnastic style, that allowed local climbers to realize that some of the more recent "21s" were actually a lot harder. This visit was a perfect example of why it's important to have global communication and cross-pollination within any niche interest. It accelerates progress immensely. This is why we go to trade-shows and meetups :-)
- steveax 12y ago
  It's not that the Steck Salathe (and other long traditional climbs) are mis-graded, it's the breadth of competencies required by them.

sveme 12y ago

That's a pretty good summary - though I'm more used to the French and Middle-European scales. As I have been searching for something like that for a while already, do you by any chance have a link to something like a cumulative distribution for fraction of climbers that can do grade x? Something like 90% of all climbers can do 5.9, 65% can do 5.10, 30% 5.11 and so forth? Percentages obviously picked out of thin air. Just out of curiosity as a climber and data nerd.

Intermernet 12y ago
Not a distribution, but probably a useful data set, is the first year a particular grade was climbed. http://web.stanford.edu/~clint/yos/hard.htm http://web.stanford.edu/~clint/yos/hard.htm For an approximation of what you're after, I'd recommend comparing number of first ascents of climbs of a particular grade in the last 3 - 5 years. This time frame should include enough data to get a reasonable answer, and won't be too biased by advances in equipment and ability over the last few decades. The Crag (http://www.thecrag.com http://www.thecrag.com) have an API that may be useful for an initial data set (http://www.thecrag.com/article/api http://www.thecrag.com/article/api). Other online resources are http://www.8a.nu http://www.8a.nu and http://www.supertopo.com/ http://www.supertopo.com/ but I don't think they have easily accessible APIs.
rfergie 12y ago
http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/graphs.html http://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/graphs.html has some stuff and you might be able to scrape the rest. I believe 8a.nu also has some public data on this kind of thing but for a more global population