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General Climbing Discussion

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If its A5 where are the bodies? 5-Feb-2008 At 3:04:11 PM anthonyk

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welll... there's still a difference between likelihood of falling and consequences if you do fall. thats sort of what the english free climbing grades cover. i guess they're a tiny bit more linked in aid climbing because you are moving off the pieces that would also hold you in a fall, but you can still look at them separately.

what the guy in the rant isn't taking into account is that people will be a *lot* more scrutinising of which climbs they are going to attempt if the risk and consequences are so high. you can still have routes that have high difficulty and high likelihood of dying and have no one die on it, because people are only going to get on it if they are very skilled and confident of being able to do it.

the argument i'm hearing is that if its hard and dangerous then statistically there should be bodies at the bottom. well maybe that would happen if you took a cross section of the community and threw them at every climb, you'd get more bodies at the bottom of the more dangerous climbs, but thats not what happens, the more dangerous a climb gets the more carefully people choose if they'll try it. it doesn't mean the grades are bogus.