A few weeks ago, during one of of the rare sunny, high-50s days we’ve had amidst major bouts of snow and cold this winter, my friend Dean and I put down our projects at a newer wall high in the Flatirons, Colorado, tucked up on the hillside above the green crease of Skunk Canyon. The climbs were two versions of the same route, which is one of the more bizarre climbs I’ve done. 

For the full version, Hellbound, which I was trying, you start in a slot that’s too wide to boulder comfortably, clip three bolts, then join the “stand start” at the lip where both climbs round a crux bulge on thin crimps. If you come from the cave, you must put a lot of logistical energy (and straight-up energy) into making the crux clips, since you’re right above an ankle-breaker platform. If you do the stand start—Heaven and Hell, Dean’s project that day—you can start with a high bolt pre-clipped and sprint through the boulder problem.

The sunlight came in at a low, southerly angle, bathing the vibrant-green rock in golden light, flooding the gully with warmth before disappearing behind Green Mountain and plunging the wall into icy shadows. Dean topped out, clipping the chains on Heaven and Hell’s upper slab, as the sun-shadow meridian crept up the wall. It couldn’t have been a more perfect outing, and another round of shitty weather blew in just one day later to coat the Flatirons in snow and ice.

***

Now that Dean and I had two new climbs, we needed to rate them. We debated various grades for both routes on the steep hike out, jumping over boulders and logs, slipping on muddy switchbacks and scree-covered slabs. In the end we settled on 5.13c for Hellbound and 5.13a for Heaven and Hell, at least as starting points, as subjective guesses, which is all a grade ever can be—it’s just a feeling until a consensus emerges. Then, in the weeks that followed, Hellbound saw an onsight by the local strongman Vasya Vorotnikov as well as two rapid redpoints, one of them by Dean. We debated the grade some more, given that new beta had been found and how quickly the route was getting repeated: 5.13c? 5.13b? 5.13b/c?

“Dude, I hate slash grades,” Dean told me, on a return trip to the wall. “No 5.13b/c.”

“You hate slash grades?” I asked. “Really.”

“Yeah—too ambiguous.”

“How about just 5.13 then?”

“Sure, I can live with that.” And so it was that we updated Hellbound’s grade to 5.13—which encompasses 5.13b, 5.13b/c, and 5.13c—on Mountain Project. The grade seemed as good as anywhere to start, at least until there are a few more repeats. And it seemed to reflect the total possible range of difficulty, since the route could certainly either be hard 5.13b or soft 5.13c, especially since height (leg length) confers a certain advantage on which crimps you use, in which order, at the crux.

As someone who puts up a lot of routes, I also like slash grades because I hate getting too deep in the weeds figuring out which letter grade to give a new climb. This is because, no matter what grade I give a route, it seems like I’m always wrong.

***

I’ve never put much thought into slash grades, and frankly never had much of an opinion other than they seemed fine, and like a useful tool for rating climbs and boulder problems—just another spin on the a/b/c/d letter grades proposed by the Yosemite climber Jim Bridwell in the 1970s to add further nuance to the plus/minus system in use prior (e.g., 5.10-, 5.10, 5.10+). In fact, I don’t put that much thought into grades at all; if I’m repeating a route, I just take the given grade (guidebook and/or Mountain Project) and move on. I’ve been climbing long enough to know that grades are almost meaningless—that I can flash a route of a given grade at 2 p.m. and have it feel easy, then try the same-graded route right next to it at 3 p.m. on the same day and not even be able to do the moves because they don’t fit me, or my beta sucks, or the conditions deteriorated, or I’m tired, or the first route was soft while the second route was sandbagged, or all of the above. This is one reason I find slash grades useful—they broaden the range of what a route might be, which means you can approach the climb with a broader range of expectations.

As someone who puts up a lot of routes, I also like slash grades because I hate getting too deep in the weeds figuring out which letter grade to give a new climb, as with Hellbound. This is because, no matter what grade I give a route, it seems like I’m always wrong. If the route’s too hard for the grade it’s a sandbag and collects cobwebs, even if it’s a high-quality climb. And if it ends up being “soft”—usually because people find other beta, which is just part of putting up new routes, on which you often get tunnel vision to stay on the bolt line, or fall in love with a certain sequence—then everyone and their mother has a turn downrating, posting that stupid green checkbox and a “personal grade” on Instagram or giving it the old “soft/second go” on 8a.nu or popping off in the “tick” field on Mountain Project. And, I will admit, this bruises my ego. I’m a climber and I have an ego, just like the rest of us (Whoa, no way, you might be saying; but actually: Yes, way!). And I get tired of seeing my climbs downgraded, which is a common occurrence on the Front Range, with its unending stream of new, aspirant hardpersons constantly pouring in, in search of the Colorado Dream, and their endless, unsolicited opinions. (I’ve even seen this phenomenon labeled “Front Range ego downrating” on Mountain Project, which, ironically, is the main tool used for Front Range ego downrating.)

Some of my vibing with slash grades might also be explained by my age, of being from a generation in the first or second wave of sport climbers, when grades at the upper end were being done for the first time ever during a very compressed time period. For example, the world’s first 5.14a, Punks in the Gym at Mount Arapiles, Australia, went up in 1985, and the first 5.14d, Hubble, went up at Raven Tor in England only five years later (or six years, if you go with the Frankenjura, Germany’s Action Directe, climbed in 1991; Hubble was rated 5.14c at the time of its first ascent but has since been uprated). By comparison, the first consensus 5.15a, Biographie at Céüse, France, went up in 2001, but 16 years would pass until the first 5.15d, Silence at Flatanger, Norway. Thus, during the period of massive evolution and change that was the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d warrant that climbers were more likely to use slash grades on their first ascents both because there were so many fewer benchmarks around and because the needle for the world’s hardest climbs was in constant flux. It was just hard to know what was what—even more difficult than now—which would explain why we got used to seeing and applying slash grades. They appeared in guidebooks, they appeared in magazines, and we accepted them as part of the landscape.

"We humans hate ambiguity, and we like having standardized ways to quantify our goals and achievements—even if life, as we experience it, will always be an ambiguous, chaotic mess. Perhaps that’s why we hate slash grades in climbing: We want at least one part of our lives to have some surety."

***

I get, however, that not everyone feels this way, and that we climbers like our ironclad, single-grade benchmarks, both as ways to cement a grade, making it as “objective” as possible, and as climbs to aspire to. I mean, who really wants to put all the work in to send their first 5.12a, only to be told later that it’s 5.11d/12a, which is pretty fucking meh as a climbing grade? Or who at the top end, other than the French climber Seb Bouin—who had been giving his hardest climbs 9b/+ (5.15b/c or some-shit) before finally committing to 9c with DNA—wants to put years of work into a first ascent that isn’t even a real benchmark, because of the slash grade? I do understand that we humans hate ambiguity, and that we like having standardized ways to quantify our goals and achievements—even if life, as we experience it, will always be an ambiguous, chaotic mess. Perhaps that’s why we hate slash grades in climbing: We want at least one part of our lives to have some surety.

I decided that because I don’t feel strongly about slash grades, I should try to understand why others do, to see if there’s a flaw to my thinking. I talked to friends like Dean and another friend and climbing partner, Chris, who’s also told me that he “loathes” slash grades, and who, while co-writing the guidebook to our local granite cragging, Boulder Canyon, very much did not use them and who wouldn’t let me get away with proposing slash grades for new routes I’d established. And I posted on Facebook, soliciting folks’ opinions. 

What emerged was that most of the climbers who were OK with slash grades understood them to be, when used properly, a tool for calling out a route that’s morpho (body type and size dependent) or that has a height-dependent crux: taller climbers would take the easier grade, and shorter climbers the harder grade. However, one person pointed out that, over the years, this just translated to everyone taking the higher grade (probably once 8a.nu, with its rankings and points systems came on the scene!), such that the slash grade became meaningless. And another pointed out that on certain routes, the standard slash grade of, say, 10a/b, would fail to portray the fact that the route might be 5.10a for a tall climber but in fact 5.11a—four letter grades harder—for a shorter one, though of course no one in their right mind would rate a route 5.10a/11a. Many pointed out that the goal with slash grades, as they understood them, was never to further split our already hair-splitting four letter grades: to take, say, the grade of 5.12, with its four touchpoints of 5.12a, 5.12b, 5.12c, and 5.12d, and turn it into the nine-headed hydra 5.11d/12a, 5.12a, 5.12a/b, 5.12b, 5.12b/c, 5.12c, 5.12c/d, 5.12d, and 5.12d/13a. Which, in fact, was precisely Chris’s main objection to slash grades.

“I don’t like them [because] they offer five more options for grades than the four letter grades we already have,” he wrote in an email. “In my view, the last thing we need is more choices, because, as you point out, it’s not like a consensus will ever fully be reached with letters. So why double the options? It seems to me this will make a consensus half as likely….” In other words, it’s more important to Chris, and others who shared his thoughts, to have a consensus grade than a consensus range, and adding more options only muddies the waters. And if that means a route like Hellbound must be either a stout 5.13b or a soft 5.13c, but not both as could be implied by a rating of 5.13b/c, then at some point someone must decide which grade is the “official” one.

Well, I’m happy to report that that someone is not going to be me. Beyond making sure that my children are fed, loved, and clothed, that my friends and pets and loved ones are happy, that no one is poaching my red-tagged routes, that my climbing shoes have crisp edges and that my rope isn’t fuzzy, and that I’ve downloaded the latest first-person shooter onto my Xbox, I don’t actually care about much of anything, nor have I seen much value in harboring strong opinions about much of anything, including slash grades. It inevitably leads to conflict and drama, and conflict and drama are a fucking drain. So to those of you who hate slash grades, I’d say I remain mostly unmoved/unmoved. See you at the cliffs/crags!

Post-script: A key hold broke on the opening crux of Hellbound, making the boulder problem much harder. So now the route is for sure 5.13c…unless, of course, it’s 5.13c/d!

Matt Samet is a freelance writer and editor, and longtime climber, based in Boulder, Colorado.

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