Grading systems in climbing
Climbing grades can be a bit confusing sometimes. If you want to understand the differences and switch from a grading system to another, here is an easy guide for you.
There are three main grading systems in the climbing world. The French, the Yosemite and UIAA (Union Internacionale des Associations d’Alpinisme).
The French grades are expressed with a number from 3 to 9, followed by a letter, either a, b or c. The easiest is 3a, the hardest in (currently) 9c. Sometimes they can also be followed by a +, (6a+ for example). If the pitch is considered to be of an intermediate difficulty between two grades.
The American Yosemite Decimal System has a number 5 as its prefix, followed by a decimal point and a number that starts from 1, and increases as the difficulty increases. After 5.10 it also adds a letter from a to d, thus dividing every difficulty into 4 subgrades. As a result 5.11a is easier than 5.12c, for example. The hardest climbed route is currently 5.15d.
Climbing grades conversion
The UIAA scale uses roman numerals followed by + or – for intermediate grades. Initially it was a closed-ended scale from I to V. But as climbers got to climb harder and harder walls, it was made open-ended an currently goes up to XII+. It is widely used for alpine climbing.
If you are interested in knowing the correspondence of grades between the different scales you can use this easy and intuitive table. As the systems are quite different the correspondence between the grades is not always exact, but this is a good approximation. In fact, the French and the American scales can be exactly aligned, whereas the UIAA scale is harder to match.
You can also find a complete table at this link: https://www.guidedolomiti.com/en/rock-climbing-grades/
We hope you found this article useful! If you want to learn more about climbing in Italy read our article! https://6bpump.com/climbing-destinations-in-italy/
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