Franskar gráður á Klifur.is

Þá er loksins komið að því! Franska gráðukerfið hefur verið tekið upp fyrir leiðsluklifur á Klifur.is. Notast er við sömu breytingatöflu og notast var við í leiðarvísinum “Leiðsluklifur á Íslandi”. Gömlu YDS gráðurnar er hægt að sjá fyrir aftan þær frönsku.

Ég læt upplýsingarnar úr leiðarvísinum fylgja með til skýringar.

Verði ykkur að góðu 🙂


The Icelandic grading system

This is the first sport-climbing guidebook published in Iceland with the French grading system. Iceland has been known for sandbagged grades but when we decided to use the French grading system and started converting the grades, we realized we were used to the distortion in the YDS system but the grades felt way off in the French system. The distortion was mostly present in the easier grades where they could lead beginners into more difficult routes than they would otherwise have chosen.

We started to look into how we could go about fixing the grades. Since it would have been too much work to fix the grades for each individual route, we decided to make a grade conversion table. We adjusted the table over the summer while we worked on this guidebook and made the table public to get feedback from the Icelandic climbing community.

The results were two conversion tables since some newer crags have a bit less distortion. We called these tables Sandbagged and Super Sandbagged. The YDS and France columns show a common way to convert the grades. The Iceland column contains the original Icelandic grades.

*Super Sandbagged taflan var notuð fyrir Hnappavelli og önnur svæði sem eru ekki í leiðarvísinum.

The changes are most profound in the lower grades but then taper off the higher you go up the scale. The Icelandic b and c grades (e.g. 5.11b and 5.11c) were combined into a single French grade since they are often less used. The higher grades stay the same. 

One thing to note. Because we are using two conversion tables there are two different outcomes for some grades, e.g. the 5.9 either becomes 6a or 6a+.

All this results in a more even distribution of grades across the scale and hopefully a better and more predictable route difficulty. The charts below show all routes in this guidebook before and after the grade conversion.

Count of routes per grade before conversion
Count of routes per grade after conversion

In a perfect world, the routes would be spread between the grades in a smooth curve. Right now, grades such as 6b, 6c, and 7b+ stand out as a bit of an anomaly but this could be telling us that maybe some of the 6a+ routes might be 6b and 7b+ probably contains some 7c routes. Overall, we are quite happy with the results and hope that others will be as well.

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