snowdenroad wrote:The escalade site lists 35 americans sending at least 9a (14d- edited to correct YDS...)
Whoa! There's at least one name on that list (at the top) that probably shouldn't be there, which illustrates the difficulty in building such lists. There's an awful lot of gray area in some of these route grades.
Nick Russell wrote: Similar in British trad with HVS (or VS in some areas) being 'defined' as the hardest grade before 'E grades' became acceptable. There's a lot of HVS sandbags out there. I've learnt to regard HVS in some areas as similar to 5.9+; that is, it could be anything up to about 4 grades harder... Is the same thing evident in the French grades at the 5+/6a boundary? There's a qualitative change in the scale at that point, with the subdivisions into letter grades only coming in at 6a but is that because of an historical 'ceiling'?
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