Grades and Grade Conversions

Grade systems are almost as old as climbing itself. Assigning a difficulty to a climb seems to be at least as important as describing it with other characteristic parameters such as length, protection or rock type. Grade systems initially developed in confined geographical areas, making the comparison of climbs somewhat easier, developed over time and were and are constantly extended as climbers manage to ascent harder and harder climbs. For example the now called UIAA grade system had a top grade of VI (six), meaning that everything harder than VI was simply assigned a VI until it was finally opened up in the late 1970s.

Even today, many grade systems are confined to certain geographical areas, sometimes climbing areas (e.g. Saxon, Fontainebleau), mostly countries (South African, Brazilian, French, etc.) or even continents (Ewbanks, YDS) and sometimes they got exported to and established themselves in different areas making some grade systems more ubiquitous than others.

Most grade systems are specific to a certain style. There are grade systems for bouldering, grade systems for sport climbing, grade systems for aid climbing and so on but even grade systems for the same style don’t always translate well between each other. The reason being that the width of grades on a specific scale are not comparable or that grades are not linear across the whole scale.

For you as a climber this means, that it might be sometimes quite tricky to accurately convert a specific grade from one grade system into another one; for us as a global information and services provider it is a challenge to display all grade information in the context the user wants to see it and use it accurately for rating and ranking purposes.

Together with the rock climbing community theCrag has developed and continues to develop a comprehensive and intuitive coverage of grades in the system. As such we welcome feedback on grades and new developments in that area. However, for this to be useful to the community as a whole we encourage you to record suggestions and criticism onto our Issues list so that the whole community can constructively contribute.

Grade conversionsVoltar a conteúdo

theCrag automatically converts grades between different grade systems according to the tables below. theCrag does so by using an open ended and fine-grained internal grade conversion system with more than 500 grade levels allowing to reflect the subtleties of most known grade systems and their conversion from and into each other.

If you have an account on theCrag, you can set your preferred grade system for major gear styles on your profile page, allowing you to look at any climbing area worldwide in the grade system you are most used to. You may also simply convert a single grade using the interactive grade converter here below.

Interactive grade converterVoltar a conteúdo

Trad and sport grade systemsVoltar a conteúdo

Bouldering grade systemsVoltar a conteúdo

Other grade systemsVoltar a conteúdo

To learn more about grades, grade contexts, grade systems used per country, protection ratings, universal grade conversion and how theCrag assigns grades to routes and ascents, please refer to the article Grades on theCrag.

Further readingVoltar a conteúdo

• Grades on theCrag
• Route Gear Styles

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