e Messiest Grade

THE MESSIEST GRADE

UNDERSTANDING 5.9, THE PLAYGROUND OF CLIMBING HISTORY

Above: Tahquitz Rock near Idyllwild, California, the site of the original 5.0-5.9 reference climbs. Photo by Don Graham, inkknife_2000, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

By Patrick Thorpe

The hold I needed was barely a foot out of reach. I was inching toward the top of a classic multi-pitch at Index, a crag in the Skykomish River Valley. What had looked like a parallel hand crack from the belay ledge had widened from thin hand jams into perfect hands, then fists, and now what? A hand stack maybe? A thin chicken wing? A lieback?! Do I have enough gas left in the tank for that? And how is

this 5.9??

“Nice work, Patrick!” called my partner from below, probably in response to my increasingly audible grunts. My muscles began to burn from lactic acid and stubbornly refused to heed my requests.

My last piece of pro, a number four Camalot, was somewhere near my feet. I had just tried to place a number three, but it had umbrellaed uselessly at the back of the crack. I would have to make the move without the comfort of any gear above me.

I buried my shoulder deep into the crack, getting as much of my body on the rock for friction as I could. If I could just move my feet up one more foot, I could grab that enticingly prominent horn.

It’s. Right. There.

As I shifted my weight to find some friction between my heel and toe, my view suddenly changed from the crack in front of me to ... the sky? Some trees? My brain hadn’t yet processed that I was airborne.

An indecorous exclamation later I sat at the end of my rope, looking 15 feet up at where I had just been.

“Welcome to Index 5.9!” someone bellowed helpfully from below before walking off with a knowing laugh.

It wasn’t the first 5.9 that I’d punted, and it wouldn’t be the last.

At that point in my climbing career, 5.9 was a couple of grades below what I considered my trad-climbing onsight grade—the grade I expect to be able to climb without falling from the ground up on my first try. But 5.9 has no regard for your perceived prowess or your wounded pride. In fact, I often climb unknown 5.10as with more confidence than I do certain 5.9s, or, heaven forbid, 5.9+.

That might seem counterintuitive at first; allow me to explain.

Years of climbing have taught me what to generally expect when the grade is 5.10a—but that cannot always be said of 5.9. If a 5.9 is an older route, I assume it will climb in the 5.10a or 5.10b (5.10-) range. If a route is rated 5.9+, I automatically give that route a 5.10c or 5.10d (5.10+) grade in my head and expect the 5.9+ pitches to be sustained 5.10- climbing with a harder than 5.10- move on them somewhere.

So why is this an issue? Climbing grades are subjective, after all, and surely we can all handle a little variation. But over the years, I have found that the 5.9 grade tends to be a mental barrier for quite a few trad climbers, and I think that’s due to the wide swath of difficulty that the 5.9 grade encompasses. Climbers attempting their first trad 5.9 may find it more than just a notch harder than the 5.8 they thought of as a stepping stone. What they don’t know is that the 5.9 they are on may well be as hard as many 5.10s.

So why is the 5.9 grade so variable? Shouldn’t it sit comfortably between 5.8 and 5.10a? As you might expect, the answer requires a bit of historical context.

According to The Freedom of the Hills (turn to page 570 of your 9th Edition, class), in 1937, the Sierra Club created an adaption of the Welzenbach rating system (which itself is an adaptation of an older system), where Class 1 is hiking and Class 5 is “where rock climbing begins in earnest.”

In the early 1950s, the legendary rock climbing pioneers Royal Robbins, Don Wilson, and Chuck Wilts decided that the existing categories of easy, moderate, and hard within Class 5 were not sufficient to describe the kind of climbing they were doing at Tahquitz Peak in Southern California, so they broke Class 5 into the now-familiar decimal system—5.0 through 5.9, with 5.0 being the easiest free climbing in Tahquitz and 5.9 being the most difficult possible. Anything beyond 5.9 would have been categorized as Class 6, or aid climbing, since it was not possible to climb those routes without the help of special tools. Thus, the precursor to the Yosemite Decimal System (the standard in rock climbing grades in the United States) was born, interestingly enough, around 375 miles south of Yosemite National Park.

Their grading system was even more specific than the 10 grades of their decimal system. Each grade corresponded to a climb in the Tahquitz area. For example, the exemplar for 5.0 was a climb called “The Trough” (now upgraded to 5.4), which was the easiest way up Tahquitz Peak. The first graded 5.9 (it is worth noting that other climbs as difficult or more difficult had already been climbed elsewhere, but not graded according to this particular grading system) was a bold climb called “Open Book” that saw its first free ascent in 1952 by a 17-year-old Royal Robbins and his partner Don Wilson—a tricky, wide crack that was only protectable at the time by custom-made wood pitons wedged into the crack. So, if you wanted to know what 5.9 feels like, you could climb the reference point.

In the mid-1950s, rock climbing pioneers in the United States turned their attention from Tahquitz to Yosemite, and the rating system that had been developed and standardized in Tahquitz followed— hence the final evolution of the name to the Yosemite Decimal System.

By the end of the 1950s, advancements in technique, athleticism, and technology pushed the upper limits of climbing in the area beyond the difficulty of “Open Book,” and it became obvious that the rating system needed to be open-ended. So, by the early 1960s, 5.10, and later 5.11 and beyond, were created—breaking the standard decimal system in favor of flexibility of grading.

Before this expansion, climbs that were developed in the latter part of the 1950s that were harder than the benchmark 5.9 “Open Book” were still being graded 5.9. Since 5.10 did not yet exist, the range that 5.9 encompassed in the 1950s became quite large. That’s why you will sometimes see 5.9 sub-divided into 5.9 and 5.9+, where 5.9+ is everything harder than the standard set by “Open Book.” Climbs graded 5.9+ often reflect that historical catch-all grade rather than fitting neatly into the now openended system—which is why that grade is notoriously difficult.

John Gill, the father of modern bouldering, began his revolutionary rock climbing career in the early 1950s. John was a gymnast and brought a level of athleticism to climbing that had not been seen up to that point. According to Pat Ament’s book John Gill: Master of Rock, in 1958, Gill made a first ascent on Baxter’s Pinnacle (“Delicate Arete Variation”) that is firmly in the 5.10 range but predates that grade. At that time, the grading system that he used to rate the boulder problems (which would eventually become the familiar V-system) started at the equivalent of 5.9—the limit of what most climbers were climbing in other styles. By 1959, John had completed a V9 first ascent (“Gill Problem,” Red Rock Cross), the equivalent of 5.13+ in difficulty!

In 1961, Gill had free-soloed a 40-foot boulder called “The Thimble,” which is a consensus V5 or 5.12. Of this particular climb, Royal Robbins wrote in the summit register, “Hat’s off to John Gill!” High praise coming from climbing royalty, but even the great Royal Robbins must have known what Gill was doing was groundbreaking. It took until 1987 for another climber to make an ascent of “The Thimble” in the style of the first ascent—though, I assume, with the exception of the basketball shoes Gill wore in favor of the yet-to-be-invented rock climbing shoes.

So, what does Gill’s story tell us? In an era when 5.9 was considered the limit of the Yosemite Decimal System, and before 5.10 and 5.11 had been established out of necessity, there were climbers both in the United States and abroad climbing well outside of the 5.9 standard set by “Open Book,” with John Gill’s 5.13+ equivalent being an extreme example. That begs the question, what would be the consensus grade of some of the more difficult 5.9s established then if they were put up now?

continued on next page

Messiest Grade, continued from previous page

Above: the author, Patrick Thrope, climbing in Potrero Chico, New Mexico.

Even with the advent of the open-ended grading system, the Yosemite Decimal System still had some growing pains. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the 5.10 grade would become so cluttered with climbs that were above 5.9, below 5.11, but obviously much different than each other that it was further divided into the now-standard 5.10a–5.10d. That became the norm for all grades above 5.10. Each number grade is broken down “a” through “d” where “a” is the easiest of the number grade and “d” is the hardest before the next number grade. But in my experience, there are climbs rated 5.10d that are subjectively (I’m not going to say objectively here, because who am I? This is just my opinion.) more difficult than pitches I have climbed graded 5.11a or 5.11b. That is why you will often hear a climber say something to the effect of, “It’s an old-school grade,” which means it’s harder than the modern consensus standard for that grade.

Certainly, climbing grades are imprecise—a guideline rather than a firm boundary. Old-school grades are different than modern grades. Different rocks lend themselves to different strengths and techniques which could make certain grades feel harder or easier depending on the climber. Certain cracks are easier to jam with particularly sized hands. Some crags have developers who are known sandbaggers, intentionally under-grading routes to increase the overall difficulty of the area. A local developer once overheard another developer say, “That was a 13. I’m going to grade it 12b” at one of our local crags. So, if you thought a route was hard for the grade, it just might be!

Climbing grades are only referential to the area in which they were established. That’s why I always encourage climbers to find a route below their climbing grade when they are being introduced to a new area in order to gauge the area as a whole. But even then, grading tends to vary from era to era, developer to developer, and from area to area within larger crags. If I see that a route was established by Paul

Highly recommend local 5.9s:

» Outer Space (Snow Creek Wall) » Direct North Ridge (Mt. Stuart) » Flyboys (Goat Wall) » Godzilla (Index) » Inca Roads (Tieton) » Young Warriors (Beacon Rock) » Gandalf’s Grip (Broughton Bluff) » Moonshine Dihedral (Smith)

Dirty » Pinkos (Smith) » Wherever I May Roam (Smith) » Phone Call From Satan (Smith) » Chouinard’s Crack (Smith) » Sunset Slab (Smith) » Fishhook Arête (Mt. Russell).