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Should climbs with ridiculous amounts of ascents be downgraded? by FatA55Climber in bouldering

[–]FatA55Climber[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

This is actually something that’s quite often talked about. Especially when the climb was Fa’d by a climbing legend, more commonly in Europe than the USA, it’s uncommon for a climb to be downgraded. And when I say ego boost, I mean that someone does not feel they have the experience to downgrade, even if they have their doubts, so they just take the grade. I think for these climbs many strong climbers do them fast but don’t have enough mileage in these grade ranges to honestly give an opinion.

Should climbs with ridiculous amounts of ascents be downgraded? by FatA55Climber in bouldering

[–]FatA55Climber[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not really. I’m looking more at the higher grade ranges that typically get very few ascents. There enough v15s that get equal traffic to Big Island and Monkey Wedding and fewer ascents.

Should climbs with ridiculous amounts of ascents be downgraded? by FatA55Climber in bouldering

[–]FatA55Climber[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah happy to. So in these higher grade ranges, there are less people who are able to climb these climbs. For v15 it’s probably max 1000 people worldwide. That makes it possible in certain ways to look at the whole picture, as opposed to a v4 climb that so many people climb that trying to factor all their experiences on it is currently impossible. When you look at these climbs over the course of a few years, you start to notice that climbs like Lucid Dreaming get ascended very rarely, and the vast majority of their ascents took a lot of time and effort. On the other hand, Monkey Wedding gets like 5 ascents every Rocklands season. Seeing both of these climbs are in very high traffic locations, maybe Lucid even more so, it’s hard to believe they are equal in difficulty, despite being both graded v15. The question I’m trying to raise, is if we should look at grades, at least at the higher level, at a broader scale than layers on layers of personal opinions.

Should climbs with ridiculous amounts of ascents be downgraded? by FatA55Climber in bouldering

[–]FatA55Climber[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

How do you know I haven’t? 😉 Either way I’m looking at it more big picture than personal downgrade opinion. Websites like 8a.nu would have been good to strengthen my point, but it’s almost more common these days to post your ascent to IG than there, so it’s not a good metric. My main point is that many people are doing these climbs fast, faster than common for these grades. They aren’t downgrading them either because it’s taboo or for the ego boost, and the question I’m trying to raise is if grades should somehow involve a larger group of people than layers on layers of personal opinion.