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Types of climbing
Climbing isn't just climbing, there is a number of diciplines to the sport and each are as different from each other as skiing and snowboarding.
Traditional (Trad) Climbing
Trad climbing is considered by many, particularly the British veterans of climbing, to be the purest form of climbing and involves the climber placing their own protection in cracks and around spikes etc.
The protection used vary from the simple Nut or Hex to the highly engineered camming devices (cams or friends).
Grading
The way trad climbs are graded depends on the difficulty of the climb itself and upon the amount of protection that one can place on that route. the main system for grading trad climbs is the British grading system.
The British trad grade consists of a prefix such as mod for moderate or diff for difficult. this prefix is the overall difficulty of the route including how much protection is able to be placed.
The second part of the grading system is the technical grade and ranges from 4a to 7b and it is an indication of the hardest single move or section of the total climb.
So, a route that is graded HVS 5b will have a particular move or section that is no harder than 5b and the overall route will be quite well protected but not quite as well protected as VS 4a for example.
Bouldering
Bouldering is climbing on short sections of cliffs, boulders and walls of around 4 metres in height without the use of saftey equipment such as ropes and harnesses.
It is considered the most free type of climbing due to the lack of restricting harnesses and ropes to get in the way.
The difficulty depends on the type of rock, the angle of the medium you are climbing and the terrain you are above.
The type of rock plays a major role in the difficulty as gritstone for instance has more flat, smooth, sloping holds than, say, limestone which is usually eroded in such a way that there are plenty of big holds and pockets for your toes and fingers to go into.
If the terrain you are climbing above is uneven and covered in other boulders then you are less likely to take a leap for that hold out of sight than you would over sand or grass.
Grading
There are a number grading systems that people use but all follow the same principle: the bigger the number/letter the greater the difficulty. Although, most of the grading systems used are very subjective as one man's V4 maybe another's V6 or vice versa.
An example
The V system is one of the more widly used systems and ranges from V0 (easy)- V16 (near impossible). This system does not take the scariness of a route into account so the same route over sand and an uneven boulder field would be graded the same.
As you can see from above, they all follow the same principle :the higher the number, the greater the difficulty.
Sport Climbing
Sport climbing is climbing rock that has in situ protection such as bolts or rings (see below) which are fixed either by expansion bolts or an epoxy resin (amazingly stong glue). This means that you don't have to put in your own protection such as nuts and cams. 
Sport climbing hanger and expansion bolt
Sport climbing is a lot safer than traditional
climbing as the potential for the protection to come out is very low. This reason allows top-end climbers to 'push their grade' as they know that a fall will not necessarilarly mean death. Sport routes are graded differently than Trad climbs due to the in situ protection. The chart at the top of page has the grading system for sport climbs.
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Anthony Eccles, 26/09/2006 |
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