So I’ve been desperately trying to get my head around all the different grading systems in place for bouldering and rock climbing. I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube video’s (Magnus Midtbo, Bouldering Bobats, IFSC Climbing world Championships, etc.) and watched the documentary “Free Solo”, which is about Alex Honnold being the first to free solo climb El Capitan, but I haven’t been able to fully appreciate the difficulty of these climbs because I don’t understand what I’m looking at (that’s the problem with being a beginner!).
Being that the bouldering gym I climb at works on the V-scale I’ve been able to appreciate the difficulty levels using this scale. It’s really easy to grasp – the higher the number the more difficult the climb! I mean if I’m only climbing at V2, and the most difficult climb in my local gym is V10, and someone’s out there climbing a V14…
All I can say is I hope you have a superhero cape hidden in that bag of yours because that’s some superhuman stuff right there!
Problem is, on pretty much all of the video’s I’m watching, they don’t talk in the V-scale!! They use the Font Bouldering Grade (I had to google this) which has numbers, numbers with letters, and numbers with letters and a plus sign just to make sure if you weren’t confused before, you are now!
If that wasn’t confusing enough, when they go rock climbing instead of bouldering, they’re talking in a completely different grading system again! There are multiple of these but the most common one I’ve come across so far is the Y.D.S. (Yosemite Decimal System (I also had to google this)).
The Y.D.S. system starts at 5.2 (apparently anything easier than this is considered walking not climbing) goes all the way up to 5.9 and then comes back down to 5.10 and then starts going up again except at 2 decimal points now instead of 1 (and sometimes letters are thrown in for bonus confusion points). The highest I believe being 5.15c.
The best way I’ve been able to understand it is through the table put up on the prioclimb.com website. I have included the table below for anyone else struggling with conversions between systems. If this was at all helpful, let me know! Hopefully with this we can better understand what on earth our favourite pro-climbers and YouTubers are going on about when they’re discussing the difficulties of climbs!
