Climbing Grades

We tend to use the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS) for grading climbs in this area. The system consists of five classes indicating the technical difficulty of the hardest section (taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(climbing)):

• Class 1 is walking with a low chance of injury and a fall unlikely to be fatal.
• Classes 2 and 3 are steeper scrambling with increased exposure and a greater chance of severe injury, but falls are not always fatal.
• Class 4 can involve short steep sections where the use of a rope is recommended, and un-roped falls could be fatal.
• Class 5 is considered true rock climbing, predominantly on vertical or near vertical rock, and requires skill and a rope to proceed safely. Un-roped falls would result in severe injury or death.
• In theory, Class 6 exists and is used to grade aid climbing (where progress is made by climbing directly on equipment placed in or on the rock and not the rock itself). However, the separate A (aid) rating system became popular instead.

The following equivalencing table comes from that same Widipedia article.