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FYI; New Canadian Ice Climbing Grading System 11-Nov-2015 At 10:19:17 PM stuart h

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This reads like something that wants to pretend that it is a satire but fails because the author fundamentally believes in the claim being made. (Clearer paragraphing would help too.)

Developments in equipment have made ice climbing dramatically easier. It has also become much more popular. Like similar developments in ski mountaineering, I am inclined to think that this is causal as well as correlative.

Waterfall climbs are much easier when they have had some traffic. This has always been the case. I have no doubt that increasing traffic means that this shows up faster on classic routes & more on distant routes than was the case a decade ago and that this is most obvious in the Canadian Rockies.

Writing about grading seems a disappointing response to these developments. Surely, even if you are supposed to be a parody, a more interesting approach exists in the possibility of climbing new, interesting and difficult routes, rather than complaining that other people might be getting or claiming easy 'ticks'. It is a bit like proudly declaring yourself the best player in D-division without remembering that you just aren't really all that good.

Fundamentally, I believe that rock climbing is not complicated & ice climbing is not very complicated and that grading is overwhelmingly an aid to people repeating routes and that the climbing of others is not as interesting to anyone as their own climbing and that it would be a lot more interesting if you wrote a trip report about the Ghost than this tiresome drivel.

Also, since you are supposed to make a living climbing as a guide, I think you should be more polite about the 'herd'.

edited: to add inverted commas around 'herd'