In this video, La Sportiva ambassador James Pearson grab his ascent to the iconic route The Quarryman, established by the British climbing legend Johnny Dawes in the 80’s.
Great video and awesome route, but something I never quite understood was why they use the E rating in the quarry even though it's completely bolted, wouldn't sport climbing grades make much more sense?
This is the british trad grading system, it is a little more complex and hard to grasp but (in my opinion) much more flexible and descriptive. The 'E' (adjectival) grade refers to the overall difficulty and severity (risk of injury) of the climb, basically it tries to give the overall picture of the climb. However this is not the end of the story, since the second grade (the technical grade) refers to the difficulty of the hardest move regardless of how many hard moves there are. Now you start to see the problem, the tech grade would be 7a if there was easy climbing and one 7a move and more easy climbing, or if it was 20 7a moves stacked on top of each other (which would be in the mid 9's as french grading), so its by taking the adjectival grade into account that you get the full picture. For example, if you have E3 6b we can infer quite a lot about the nature of this route since it has a low adjectival grade and a comparitively high technical grade, which means that the crux, although tricky (6b move), is well protected and the rest of the route is probably quite easy. However on the other end of the scale, if we have E7 6b we can be pretty sure that, although the crux moves should be equally as hard in the previous route (both 6b), the adjectival grade is much higher (E3 compared to E7) which tells us that this route will very likely be very bold, with a poorly protected crux which, if you fall of it, could result in injury. Given that the discrepency between the adjectival and technical grades in this case, we could also infer that it is likely to be sustained, with a few moves in the 6b range, which would affect the adjectival grade. If however it is a less obvious discrepency, such as E5 6b, we could infer that the route is fairly well protected and relatively sustained, or perhaps poorly protected but with only a few hard moves. As a rule of thumb, the higher the adjectival grade the more committing you can expect the climbing to be, in that you will likely never find anything above E7 which is entirely comfortable, and consequently they will involove a fair bit of commitment. I hope this clears things up for you, its a difficult system to explain since it is so richly descriptive (which is why is is perfect for our british, bold trad climbing) but I tried my best! There are articles online which do a much better job of explaining it. Also, for some context, E8 7a probably works out at about F8b.
Not great footy of the ‘actual moves’ drone shots are way to far away, please if your gonna film climbing show more of the holds and moves please no one cares about drone shots from a mile away...sorry to mention the obvious
