The history of the grade

Two climbers stood under the same boulder problem can have a genuine argument about whether it is a soft touch or a sandbag, and both can be a bit right. That argument is older than either of them, older than the climbing wall, older than the sticky rubber on their shoes. Grades have been contested since the moment someone first tried to put a number on how hard a piece of rock is to climb. Understanding where the grade came from, and why there are so many competing systems, makes that number a lot less stressful and a fair bit more interesting.

Why grade anything at all

Before grades, climbers described routes in words, which worked fine when everyone knew everyone and climbed the same crag. But as climbing spread, people wanted a quick way to know whether a route was within their ability before committing to it, or whether it would kill them. A grade is, at heart, a warning and a promise: this is roughly how hard, and roughly how serious.

The trouble is that "how hard" is not one thing. A route can be hard because the moves are desperate, or because it is long and pumpy, or because a fall would be terrible, or because the rock is loose and the gear is rubbish. Different climbing cultures, in different places, cared about different combinations of those things, and so they built different grading systems. That is why we ended up with a confusing patchwork rather than one tidy scale.

A grade was never meant to be a precise measurement. It started as one person's honest guess at how hard a thing felt, passed on to the next person as a rough heads-up.

A patchwork of systems

If you have ever been baffled by V-grades and Font grades and French sport grades and British trad grades all describing climbs, you are not alone, and the history explains it. Different systems grew up to describe different disciplines and different national traditions.

A rough map of the main ones you will meet:

Each of these made sense in its own context. The British trad system, for instance, uses two parts, an adjectival grade for the overall seriousness and a technical grade for the hardest move, precisely because British trad cared as much about how scary and committing a route was as about the difficulty of the moves. Bouldering systems like V and Font focus purely on the difficulty of the movement, because on a boulder with a mat below, the seriousness is mostly taken out of it. If you want the practical detail of reading these, how climbing grades work, V and font and how rope grades work, French and YDS lay it all out.

Grades creep upwards over time

One of the more interesting things history shows is that the top of every grading scale keeps moving. When a system is invented, the hardest climb of the day sits at the top. Then someone climbs something harder, and the scale has to be extended. This has happened again and again across every discipline.

This open-endedness is deliberate and a bit beautiful. Nobody designing the early scales assumed they knew the limit of human climbing, so they built systems that could keep growing. The hardest grades climbed today would have been considered physically impossible by earlier generations, and the same will very likely be said of today's limits in a few decades.

It also means grades are not absolute across time. A given grade was calibrated against the climbing of its era, the techniques, the training, the shoes. As the sport got better at all of those, what counts as a given grade shifted subtly too. A number is a snapshot of a moment as much as a measurement.

The eternal argument: soft, stiff and sandbags

Because grades started as one person's honest guess, they have always been subjective and inconsistent. The first ascensionist suggests a grade, the climbing community either agrees or argues, and over time a rough consensus settles, though it never fully settles. Some crags and areas have a reputation for being stiff, where everything feels harder than the number, and these get called sandbagged. Others feel generous, or soft.

This is not a flaw to be fixed, it is baked into what a grade is. A few things follow from accepting that:

• Grades vary between crags, areas and countries, sometimes by a noticeable margin
• Indoor grades and outdoor grades rarely line up, indoors usually feels softer
• A single climb can suit your body and feel easy, or fight your body and feel brutal
• Old-school areas often grade harder than modern gyms, on purpose or by tradition

The whole tradition of sandbagging, sometimes affectionate and sometimes mischievous, is part of climbing culture. What is sandbagging goes into the lore of it.

What the history should teach you

The practical lesson from all this messy history is a healthy looseness about grades. They are useful, they are not sacred. Use them to pick climbs roughly within your range and to avoid getting in over your head somewhere serious. Do not use them to measure your worth, to compare yourself against other climbers, or to have a bad day because something graded at "your level" spat you off.

A few honest reminders the history backs up:

• Your body suits some grades and styles and not others, and that is normal
• A number from one area does not transfer cleanly to another
• Falling off something at your grade does not mean you have got worse
• The most satisfying climbing often ignores the number entirely

Grades came from climbers trying to be helpful to each other, giving a rough heads-up about what a route would ask of them. They splintered into many systems because climbers in different places cared about different kinds of difficulty, and they keep growing because nobody has found the limit. Treat the number on the topo as what it has always been, a useful, fallible, human estimate, and it stops being a source of stress and goes back to being what it was for: a friendly warning about what you are about to pull on.