Flash, onsight, redpoint: send styles explained

Two climbers can both tick the same 7a, and the climbing world will treat those ascents very differently. The grade tells you how hard the moves are. The style tells you how the climb was done, and to a lot of climbers the style matters just as much.

The main styles, from purest to most worked

The styles describe how much you knew and how many tries it took.

• Onsight. You climb it clean, first try, with no prior information at all. You have never watched anyone on it, you have had no beta, you have not even read about the moves. You read the rock as you go. This is generally considered the highest, purest style because nothing is given to you.
• Flash. You climb it clean, first try, but you had some information beforehand. You watched someone do it, you got beta, you read a guidebook description, you knew where the crux was. Still first go, still no falls, just not blind.
• Redpoint. You climb it clean from bottom to top, no falls and no resting on the rope, but only after practising the moves over multiple attempts. You might have spent a session, or a season, rehearsing the sequence before linking it.
• Pinkpoint. An older term for a redpoint where the quickdraws were pre-placed rather than clipped on lead. These days most people just call it a redpoint and do not bother distinguishing.

For boulderers the words are simpler. A boulder problem done first try with no beta is an onsight, first try with beta is a flash, and any clean ascent after working the moves is just a send or a "tick".

Why style matters as much as the grade

If grade were everything, nobody would care how a route went down. But climbing has always valued the manner of the ascent, not just the difficulty.

Think about what each style asks of you. An onsight demands that you read holds you have never touched, find rests on the fly, and commit to moves you have not rehearsed. It tests your head and your route-reading as much as your fingers. A redpoint, by contrast, lets you remove all the uncertainty and pour everything into pure execution, which is how people climb at the absolute edge of their physical limit.

That difference is why a 6c+ onsight can feel like a bigger achievement than a 7a redpoint for the same climber. One was a leap into the unknown, the other was a polished performance. Neither is better in any absolute sense, they just reward different things.

Style also shapes how you train and what you chase. If you only ever redpoint, you can get very strong on familiar moves but freeze the moment you face something new. If you only ever onsight, you may never find out what you are physically capable of when the uncertainty is taken away. Most well-rounded climbers do a bit of both.

A quiet matter of honesty

There is an unwritten rule underneath all this: you report your ascent honestly. If you fell once and pulled back on, it was not a flash. If you had beta, it was not an onsight, even if no one would ever know. The whole vocabulary only works because climbers are honest about it with themselves and each other.

Keeping a record of how each climb went, not just whether you ticked it, is where the real picture of your progress lives. Watching your onsight grade creep up tells you something that your hardest redpoint never will. Sendit lets you log the style alongside the grade, so over time you can see not just what you climbed, but how. And that, more than any single number, is the honest story of how you are improving.