Flash, send and redpoint, explained

You finish a climb, drop to the mat, and your mate asks "did you flash it?" and you have no idea what they mean. So you nod, vaguely, and resolve to look it up later. It is one of those bits of climbing language that everyone seems to have absorbed by osmosis, and that nobody explains, partly because the words are simple and partly because the etiquette around them is not. Here is the whole thing, plainly.

The core idea is that in climbing, how you did a climb matters as much as whether you did it. The grade tells you the difficulty. These words tell you the style, and style is what climbers actually talk about.

Send: the umbrella word

"Send" is the broadest of the lot. To send a climb is to complete it cleanly, from the start to the finish, without falling or resting on the rope or otherwise cheating the difficulty. On a boulder problem it means you started at the proper start, did every move, and topped out or held the final hold under control. On a rope it means you climbed from the ground to the anchor without weighting the rope.

The word probably comes from "send it", the encouragement you hear shouted at someone about to commit to a hard move. It has become the catch-all term for success. When someone says they sent their project, they mean they finally did it clean. It does not, on its own, say anything about how many tries it took, and that is where the other words come in.

A send is a send, but climbers are nosy about style. The first question after "did you send" is almost always "how", because the how is the interesting part.

Flash and onsight: doing it first go

A flash is sending a climb on your very first attempt, but with prior knowledge. You watched someone else do it, you got beta, you knew the sequence going in, and you executed it first try. It is a genuinely impressive thing because you have to read, remember and perform without any practice on the actual moves.

An onsight is the purest version of a first-go ascent. You climb it first try with no prior knowledge at all: you have never seen anyone on it, nobody has told you the beta, you have no idea what is coming. You read it as you go, on sight. Onsighting is prized because it tests everything at once, your strength, your route-reading and your nerve, with no safety net of foreknowledge. The distinction between these two comes down entirely to information, and what beta really means explains the currency they trade in.

To keep them straight:

• Onsight: first try, no beta, no prior knowledge. The hardest and most respected.
• Flash: first try, but you had beta or watched it first.
• Send: completed clean, any number of attempts.

Redpoint: the climb you had to work for

A redpoint is sending a climb after practising it, often over many attempts or many sessions. You fall off, you rehearse the moves, you work out the sequence, you rest and come back, and eventually you put it all together in one clean go from bottom to top. Most hard climbs get done as redpoints, because anything near your limit usually takes work.

The word has a nice bit of history. It comes from the German "rotpunkt", coined at the Frankenjura crags, where climbers would paint a red mark at the base of a route they had practised and then climbed cleanly. The red point meant "done properly, in one push, no resting on gear". That ethic, that the whole climb has to be linked in a single clean ascent, is what redpoint still means today.

A redpoint is no less of a send than a flash. It is just a different style. Many of the proudest ascents in climbing are long-fought redpoints that took weeks or years. The difference between a project you are still working and the moment it becomes a send is one of the most satisfying transitions in the sport, and the difference between a project and a problem digs into that.

Why any of this matters

You could ask why climbers bother with all this vocabulary when "I climbed it" would do. The answer is that the style of an ascent is most of the story. Onsighting a route says something very different about your climbing than redpointing the same route after thirty tries, even though the grade is identical. The words let climbers describe their experience precisely and honestly, and honesty about style is a point of pride.

There is also a quiet etiquette here. Claiming a flash when you had quietly watched someone do it, or calling something a send when you grabbed a draw on the way up, is frowned on. Nobody is checking, but climbers generally hold themselves to the standard because the whole value of the words depends on them being used truthfully.

So next time someone asks if you flashed it, you can answer properly. Maybe it was an onsight, maybe a flash, maybe a hard-won redpoint after six sessions of cursing. All three are good. The grade is just a number. The style is the bit worth talking about over a brew afterwards, and now you have the words for it.