Reading University Mountaineering Club - RUMC

Sport (French) Grades

I will start with sport climbing, or French, grades as this is likely to be the first system a new climber will encounter at the local wall. This is a very simple system used for bolt-protected climbing either at indoor walls or sport climbing crags. Basically the grades start at 1 (the easiest) and go up from there as things get more difficult. It is very rare to see climbs graded 1 or 2 but 3 is common and 4 even more so. After 4 things get marginally more complicated with the addition of the subgrades of a, b and c and all grades can have the further addition of + grades too. So 6b is harder than 6a but 6a+ is halfway in between (or f6b, f6a and f6a+ as you will sometimes see it written).

To give you an idea of the difficulty, most people will be able to climb 3 and 4 with a little effort in their first days of climbing, with 5 and 5+ coming quite quickly as you develop climbing specific strength and learn a few tricks and techniques. 6a is fairly tricky but attainable and 6b is pretty hard and takes some skill and strength. 7a is hard, taking some serious effort and experience to climb and is normally a major milestone for a climber, then 8a is desperate - very few people climb that hard regularly. Grades are open ended but currently the hardest route in the world is a superhuman 9b+!

This system gives a grade for the overall ‘feel’ of the route so there can be a degree of variation. For example a very easy route with just one very hard move may get the same grade as a route with lots of mildly difficult moves in a row. Additionally a 10m 6a is going to have harder moves than a 30m 6a, but you will feel equally knackered at the top of both routes, so they get the same grade. One further thing to bear in mind is that routes graded with this system are graded for the easiest possible method and allow for pre-practice. An f6a is the same grade if you lead it, top-rope it, or have done it 10 times before. However this also means that if you miss a hidden hold or a trick move they can feel much harder than the stated grade!

British Adjectival System

Also known as trad grades, these are used to grade the naturally/traditionally protected routes that are most common in Britain. These developed at the dawn of climbing when gentlemen in tweeds would go out climbing with a pipe in their mouth and the butler holding their rope. Obviously, because they were gentlemen, a simple number was far too crude so they used adjectives, giving birth to the world’s greatest grading system.

It originally started at ‘Easy’ but it is very hard to find any of these now (they are mostly overgrown and slimy or descent routes), with Moderate being the lowest grade, followed by Difficult (which perversely is actually quite easy), Very Difficult, Severe (still not too scary, but tricky enough), Very Severe and finally Extremely/Exceptionally Severe. However, as if this wasn’t already enough, you can also add ‘mild’ and ‘hard’ before the grades to give even more grades, such as Mild Severe or Hard Very Difficult! Fortunately later, less verbose, generations of climbers decided that this was all a bit of a mouthful and began to use just the first letters to give us HVD, VS etc. Later on, as harder and harder climbs were being done, more grades were required, so the Exceptionally Severe grade had a number appended to it to give us E1, E2 etc with the higher numbers indicating increasing difficulty and/or danger.

Which brings us to the major advantage of British grades – they grade the route in terms of difficulty and danger. For example, a standard VS route with plenty of gear would be about f4+ in the French system, but a VS with very little gear (so more dangerous and scary) may only be a F3+ in terms of difficulty but VS in terms of danger i.e. it is mentally difficult rather than physically difficult. The idea is that when we try more risky climbs we want more of a margin of ability than on safer routes, but a scary route will feel as hard as a more physical safe route, so they get the same grade.

To help get this message across we have the British technical grade, which is used to describe the hardest single move on a route. This system starts at 1a, goes through 1b and 1c to 2a, 2b etc and again is open ended. Although it looks similar to French grades it is actually a completely different scale, with f5 routes having 4c moves, f6b may have 5c moves and 6a moves are normally found on routes of f6c and above. This British technical grade is combined with the adjectival grade to give grades such as VS 4c, HVS 5b, E3 6a etc. However, technical grades are generally not given for adjectival grades below Severe for some reason. Therefore you won’t normally find 1a, 2a or 3a in a guidebook, except on Southern Sandstone where the technical grade is the only grade given due to the top-roping only ethic rendering the adjectival grade pointless.

The beauty of the British system is its subtlety, once you understand it. Any given adjectival grade has an average technical grade, e.g. HVS 5a, so if you see a route graded HVS 5c it tells you that there will be one very hard move on the route with easier climbing either side, with the hard move either very well protected or straight off the floor. Conversely, an HVS 4c grade tells you that the climbing is either very poorly protected or that it is incredibly sustained with move after move at 4c so very tiring. The difference should be obvious from the ground.

One last thing to bear in mind with the British grading system is that routes are graded for on-sight lead ascents, taking into account how hard it is to find holds, work out moves or arrange protection, meaning that if you top-rope an E1 it may well feel relatively easy, but to lead it may be a different matter. Equally, if you top-rope a route before you lead it, that prior knowledge means that you can’t really claim an E1.

Anyway! That’s how the British grade system works. This is an incredible quantity of words to describe a four or five character grade, but that is the beauty of this system – just a few characters can impart a wealth of information.

Bouldering Grades

Bouldering has always been part of climbing but until relatively recently it hadn’t been considered as a separate, stand-alone aspect of the sport in this country, with the first dedicated bouldering guidebook only hitting our shelves in the 1990s. As a result bouldering grades in Britain use different systems in different areas and even use different systems in different guides to the same areas! It will eventually settle down but until it does you will need to be aware of two different systems – Fontainbleau and V grades. One further system shown in the grading tables is the B grade. This was introduced in the first Peak District bouldering guides but has now been superseded, and you are unlikely to come across it in use.

Fontainbleau grades were developed in the bouldering paradise of the same name just south of Paris. Unfortunately this system uses ascending numbers with increasing difficulty, with a, b, or c subdivisions, just like sport grades or English technical grades but once more the numbers do not correspond with either of the other two systems, with a fontainbleau 6a being much harder than a French 6a route, for example. Fontainbleau bouldering grades are often abbreviated to font 6a, fb 6a or 6A (note the capital letter) to distinguish them from route grades. V grades are the American equivalent, developed by John ‘The Vermin’ Sherman (hence the V). They are very simple with V0 being easiest and each grade getting harder to the current hardest problems in the world being V15. You may also come across a VB grade, which indicates something easier than V0. These systems are both great in the higher grades and are basically interchangeable but both start at a pretty advanced level, especially V grades where V1 is pretty tricky. (Check out the grade tables above for some comparisons)

Bouldering grades are given for the easiest possible sequence so if a problem is given fb6a or V2 but feels like fb7b or V8 then you must be missing something!

Thanks to Monkey for taking the time to write this article!