To grade or not to grade

Thanks to Nicholas Hobley for the invaluable encouragement and feedback that lead to the final draft.

Cover photo: James on Echo Wall (photo credits: Once upon a climb).

Numbers never lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth either. And a climbing grade is but a number: an integral aspect of the sport, but a far cry from the whole picture. How much importance should we give to the grade in our climbing experience? Elite trad climbers Jacopo Larcher and James Pearson have a lot to say on the matter.

Hailing from the autonomous region of South Tyrol in Northern Italy, Jacopo is well known for his repeats hard and bold trad routes (the likes of Rhapsody and Beth Rodden’s Meltdown) as well as several free ascents of big wall routes, including Eternal Flame in the Trango massif, The Nose on El Capitan and Odyssey on the Eiger’s North Face, all with his partner Babsi Zangerl. His masterpiece to date is probably the first ascent of Tribe in Cadarese (Italy) in 2019. While it is thought to be amongst the hardest single pitch trad routes in the world, Jacopo refused to grade it: to him, a mere number could not summarise his journey on the route, and the friendships he made along the way.

More known to the British community, James started climbing in the Peak District, where he quickly rose to fame for his bold repeats and first ascents. In 2008, he made the first ascent of The Walk of Life, grading it E12, though Scottish trad legend Dave MacLeod made an early repeat and downgraded it to E9. The harsh criticism that ensued the overgrading led James to leave the UK for the continent, where he met his wife (pro climber Caro Ciavaldini) and took the chance to develop into the more mature climber we know of today. In 2023 he made the first ascent of Bon Voyage and graded it E12, thus establishing another contender to the title of ‘hardest trad route in the world’. This would be confirmed by early repeats of the route by Adam Ondra and Seb Berthe, as well as Jacopo himself who claimed the fourth ascent in late 2025. In addition to this, he made the first repeats of both Tribe and Dave MacLeod’s infamous Echo Wall - an initially ungraded route on the North Face of Ben Nevis. Whilst he graded Echo Wall as ‘hard E11’, he decided to leave the veil of mystery on Tribe respecting Jacopo’s decision to leave the route ungraded.

Needless to say that Jacopo and James are likely to be the most suitable climbers to tell us about the stories and experiences that numbers alone cannot describe. Or, in James’ case, about the controversies that arise if we give too much importance to numbers. Our conversations have been edited for the purpose of length and clarity.

D: So here’s an ice breaker question: close your eyes and describe to me your dream line.

JACOPO: It’s a hard question because I like different aspects of climbing. If we talk about trad climbing, my dream line would be a very aesthetic route… maybe a crack-line on a wider wall without bolts, obviously. I’d like it to have pretty good placements but far apart and hard climbing in between. That would be my dream route: a proud granite line with lots of bouldery power endurance moves in between good gear.

JAMES: Hmmm, so just after doing Rhapsody, I was obsessively searching for something that would be similar in style, maybe a bit harder, more technical and with a huge runout. I was so stuck on that idea that I let quite a few opportunities slip by - including Bon Voyage! The first time I went to Annot I didn’t even think about that one. As soon as I saw all those pockets I wrote it off as ‘not my style’. It was only when I had kids that Caro and I no longer had the luxury to travel where and when we wanted that we started to be a bit more open about what this dream route would look like… and I found Bon Voyage.

D: Unsurprisingly, no grade was mentioned in your answer! Of all your ascents - first or repeats - you’re mostly known for the harder ones. Are there any climbs that are not quite at your limit but still somewhat mean a lot to you? Possibly climbs the public do not know much about.

JACOPO: There are a few. One is this arete in Cadarese called Jeune et Con. It’s not crazy hard but it’s very aesthetic, something you can’t help to stare at when you walk by. It has very nice moves in between marginal gear. The Red Corner is another one I remember particularly well. It’s a multipitch route I opened with Hansjorg Auer and Siebe Vanhee in Siberia during our expedition in 2015. Nothing crazy hard, probably up to 7c+ but it’s a very nice line in a remote place that means a lot to me.

JAMES: Yeah you do get some very memorable climbs on expeditions. One that stuck with me was climbing Cape Enniberg in the Faroe Islands - one of the biggest sea cliffs in the world. Basically 200m of… yeah you can call it rock, some of it in a very decomposed state, and the other 500m is literally near vertical grass. In the end we ended up climbing a lot of it in these local shoes that the islanders use to go hunting for birds. It’s basically a thick leather sock you put over your boots. The wool sticks well to the grass and mud so we climbed a lot in those. 

D: So Jacopo, amongst the first ascents under your name, ‘Tribe’ is a really special one. It is thought to be one of the hardest trad routes in the world, but you decided to leave it ungraded. Could you take us through the journey that led you to finish this monumental project?

JACOPO: The journey has been quite long, but not because I tried it many times. It was a 7 year long journey that started on my first day trad climbing in Europe. Ricky Felderer showed me that line when I first visited Cadarese. At the time I was a good sport climber but I did not have much experience in trad climbing, so the easier routes were keeping me busy, but Ricky pointed out the line and suggested that it could be a good project. That very same day after we climbed together I went back to the car to get my static line and headlamp and I started trying the route. At the beginning I was really amazed by the aesthetics of the line, but I had no idea if it was climbable or not. My first thoughts were that it would not be a crazy hard climb physically but a very dangerous one, close to a solo. As time went by I actually realised that it was the opposite: the moves were very hard but the overall route was quite safe. In some sense the route was a mirror of my evolution as a trad climber, because I started it when I had zero experience, and then year after year I’d go back to Cadarese with different skills and a different set of eyes. It was a special process because I mostly went there alone and in this way I met this climbing community, this ‘tribe’ of Cadarese, so the route is also linked with many friendships and good memories with amazing people.

D: You decided not to grade it, but at any point of the journey, did you think about what grade the crux sequence would go at, or maybe some of your colleagues asked you what grade you thought the route would be?

JACOPO: I’m actually surprised and pleased at the same time that the first and second repetitions did not suggest a grade. I was pretty sure that the first repetition by James would have resulted in the route being graded, but I think that is totally fine. It’s not that I didn’t grade it because I didn’t want the route to have a grade. For me it was more of a message and since then I have stopped grading all of my first ascents. But yeah, I would be totally fine with it, unless someone says it’s 5.10 (French 6a, ndr) then I would disagree! The problem is that nowadays people are putting so much importance on the grade. For example, if someone puts up a route and grades it, say, 5.12a (French 6c+/7a) there is almost a race to check if it’s really 5.12a, and if it’s easier then he’d get into some shitstorm. For me grades shouldn’t be for that. I use grades too - I like to read guidebooks and grades are useful to give some information on the route. They are important, but I have the feeling that we are forgetting why they are important.

D: James, you made the first repeat of Tribe and respected Jacopo’s decision to leave it ungraded. You recently repeated Echo Wall, which was also initially ungraded, but you ended up suggesting a grade and writing a lot about your line of thoughts behind it.

JAMES: Uuh… It kind of just happened! If we use grades for what they are designed to be - a guideline - then they are useful. The problem we have is when we use grades to compare climbers and their achievements. That to me is a very poor use of them and I really don’t like that but obviously I am rather oversensitive because of The Walk of Life. I realise now that a lot of the reasons that I graded it the way I did is that I was inexperienced, especially on that type of terrain. Maybe the only time I try to comment on a grade is if, for example, it is important for a historical reason, or there is a lot of confusion around the grade. With Echo Wall for example, there was some kind of public speculation of how hard it might be so I just wanted to put my view using as much of my experience in other styles so people can see ‘OK, this is James, this is what he’s done and this is what he feels’ rather than ‘this is THE grade of Echo Wall’. We often fall into that problem and I wrote a lot about that after Bon Voyage: you can have two different climbers with two different skill sets and try the same route which they go to try on two different days with different sets of conditions and the difference in the perceived grade can be huge. That’s why I don’t comment on grades sometimes and people do get annoyed but I think that there are more important things in climbing.

D: I guess it goes back to the idea that if a statistic becomes an objective it loses its significance. Do you think that numbers and statistics are playing too much of a role in climbing today, whether it is, number of pullups, instagram followers, fastest time on the speedwall or indeed grades?

JACOPO: This is definitely changing the sport - it’s hard to say if in a positive or negative way. This is also due to the fact that climbing is booming, and it’s still evolving. But this aspect that you mention is mostly linked to our everyday lives. Everything has to be faster, more productive and somewhat measured, and obviously it reflects in climbing as well.

JAMES: Yes, I’d agree with that — but it makes sense in the world we seem to be living in, where everyone’s attention spans seem to be shrinking by the day. Being able to quickly and easily compare two completely different climbers based on how long they can hang from a 20 mm edge, or how many one-arm pull-ups they can do, is clearly interesting for a lot of people, but like Caroline always says, if you want to compare climbers, then watch the World Cup. She’s obviously joking, but she’s also kind of right. World Cup competitions bring athletes together and ask them all to do (relatively speaking) the same task, on the same day, in the same conditions.

I’m a geek — I like numbers and statistics — but you’re absolutely right that we might be missing the point: the joy of climbing. What’s really interesting is in the nuance, and all the things we can’t quantify.

D: What do you think of these grade calculators such as eGrader or its AI version Darth Grader? Do you think it’s an attempt to make grading more objective and it has achieved its purpose?

JACOPO: I honestly dislike them (laughs ndr). I can see them as a useful tool, but I do think that climbing routes cannot be graded with an algorithm. For me a grade is a suggestion from the first ascensionist and a group of people repeat the route and agree on a number.

JAMES: Actually, one of the things I get asked often is that if I always have mixed feelings when it comes to grading then why did I put so much effort into eGrader, which was a small algorithm we created to try to make things line up more neatly. But I also think that if we decide that we are going to grade things, it would be nice to keep things consistent and logical and that’s a hard thing to do because everyone has different experiences. But the other guys on the project and myself tried to get enough people with enough different experience on different rock to share our opinion on things. If we all put it in one database, for sure you’d have outliers but eventually you’ll get to the average, and from that you can draw some statistics. It is really promising what it has already done and it definitely helped me to understand my own grading or situations where it doesn’t already work and why.

JACOPO: Let me just stress that, as I said, it could be a useful tool if you want a second opinion. Maybe you’ve just done a first ascent and you want to grade it but you’re trying it alone. But it cannot replace human judgement. Also because climbing is so subjective - a route can be harder or easier depending on your body type. You can be taller, shorter… there’s just so much at play. It’s all very dependent on experience so surely it can’t be calculated uniquely by an algorithm.

D: Do you also find trad routes are also trickier to grade, especially the bold ones?

JACOPO: Yes, I think so. Even if I spend most of my time trad climbing I still don’t get the British grades… and every time James tries to explain them I have a hard time. Or maybe I think I got it and then I realise that I didn’t. But generally yes, the harder the routes get the harder they are to grade, also because there are fewer people able to climb those routes, so you do not have as many opinions. And danger is even harder to judge. The problem with the easier ‘sketchy’ routes is a matter of experience as well: if you climb a dangerous 7a route and you’re a 9a climber, you will have a very different experience from someone who climbs 7b at their best.

D: I’ll get back to the British grading system later because I think James might disagree with you on that, but it goes back to history as well, I guess. Many ‘older routes’ in the UK were climbed ground-up which makes the experience of the first ascent much more intense, and that could also influence the grading.

JACOPO: Oh yes, definitely. There are some routes like Appointment with Death... if you try to do it ground-up and you fall you’re dead, or you’ll end up at the hospital. Danger is not that easy to quantify.

JAMES: Yes, it does get a lot tricker when you bring in the danger factor in addition to the physiological aspects of a climb. I remember there was a route Jacopo and I did at Annot last year called Mammoth Balls. It revolves around a crucial piece of gear: a filed down tricam which goes into a small pocket. It looks absolutely bomber until the lip of the pocket breaks and one day it will break because the sandstone at Annot is very soft. You do the crux move of this route 2 or 3 meters from this piece so if it holds you are taking a 4m fall onto that gear and you’ll be fine. If it rips you could possibly die. The outcomes are lightyears apart and it all depends on the possibility of a small fragment of rock breaking. And how do you quantify that? I would not have done the route if the gear wasn’t there but I trusted the gear to a certain extent though not as much as if it was a bolt. If you grade it for that gear being good then you might give it E8 maybe and tell people that the route is safe. Then someone falls off, rips the placement and dies on a route that was supposed to be safe. And if you grade it E10 or E11 and somebody falls off and the gear held then you’d just be an overgrader. At some point you have to realise that it does not have to be one or the other: it can be both or even a spectrum!

D: Since we’re at it, I should ask: what’s your favourite grading system and why?

JACOPO: Ehm… the beauty one [laughs ndr]? Jokes aside, let’s say the normal one such as YDS or the French one with R or X at the end. So, 5.10 or 6a if it is a perfect splitter crack, or 5.10 R if it’s runout, and if it is dangerous 5.10 RX or X.

JAMES: Hah! I really like the British grade, because what it really does is the YDS system: a physical grade and a danger grade. But it isn’t quite as simple as that. The reason I really like British grades is that they are far from exact so they allow you to be not as precise with your thoughts and you can come up with a number but nobody knows what it really means. Sounds contradictory for someone who worked on a grading algorithm, but I also think that if you try to be too precise it can be really quite complicated. Maybe the best algorithm just spits out random numbers, who knows!

D: I wish more people were invested in the beauty grade!

JAMES: Actually, going back to why I didn’t grade Tribe it’s also because I had a different experience from Jacopo - it was not a first ascent and I am a bit taller than him but mainly because I respected what Jacopo as trying to do when he didn’t grade it and keep people focused on the beauty. But it’s hard to quantify beauty which is why people do not like it.

JACOPO: Yes but again, grades are important, I’m not saying that they aren’t. If you travel to an area it’s nice to know if that route is 6a or 9a before you try it. But it should just be an indication, it should not be the final goal. For me it is weird to hear people who say ‘I want to climb 9a.’ It’s nice that people have that goal but I mostly hear people wanting to climb a certain grade rather than wanting to climb a certain route. I feel that the goal should be more an experience on a line rather than a number.

D: James, do you think that a grade calculator would have avoided the controversy around ‘The Walk of Life’?

JAMES: I like to think it would have helped me. I was a very different person, probably a lot more sure of myself in a very arrogant way but I can definitely remember feeling torn as my understanding and experience did not line up. Part of me felt like it was an insane experience beyond anything I would have done. But another part of me felt that maybe it wasn’t all that hard and was able to top rope it very easily and for a reason unknown to me I felt so different on the lead because I was very inexperienced on that style and all the mental preparation and tactics I learnt from gritstone did not work for a route as long as that. I couldn’t stay in that headspace to deal with that fear and exposure for long enough. All the routes I was used to doing took me a lot less and The Walk of Life was over in more than an hour. What I hoped that an eGrader would have done is for me to see that even though there is a danger element interacting with the overall difficulty it can only go so far in terms of the physical difficulty. The worst thing that can happen is that you die on a route, but you can’t ‘die any more’ so to speak. Once you get to that point that’s as far as you can get but on the difficulty point you can take it arbitrarily far. I think that as simple as it sounds people often misunderstand that with trad grading so eGrader might have helped me to rationalise my experience and allowed my judgement not to be clouded by my emotions. Overall I’d say it is a good baseline to start on.

D: So how should we name the best climber, if we really have to… take Caroline’s advice and go watch the World Cup? Or maybe the best climber is the one having the most fun, as the late Alex Lowe once put it?

JACOPO: There are many moments that are not fun but they still make you a good climber! But I do agree with Alex. If you can enjoy the process to the very end, you can’t help but be good at what you do.

JAMES: If you’re not having fun then what’s the point! But there are many things that we do and are not necessarily fun but they help us to grow… I would be more inclined to say that the best climber out there is the one out there pushing themselves and doing things that they didn’t think were possible for themselves. As with grades, personal limits can be subjective and dependent on experience.