Unrest over the boulder problems at our beloved NARG came to a head last week, and boiled over in a route setting event to bring things back to the old school, you know, the days when everything up to a v4 was easy, and higher grades were a cacaphony of hardness. Gym rats and outdoorsy-types came and set a variety of routes that, while the problems and moves are interesting, will probably draw ire of their own from regulars. Business as usual for a rock gym, we figure.
Ratings-wise the new routes, all in the front cave and slab sections of the gym, are a kind of a shake-up. Last year, Conrad set out on a mission to make things more uniform. He was hoping to have an even progression of difficulty up into the higher grades, and rate problems softer than we were used to, but what he considered more realistically pegged to national V-grades. His work changed the character of the bouldering at the gym, and it’s our observation (and opinion!) that he did a good job at making the arg a place where one could actually train and improve and learn technique, rather than climb easy shit for a while then get shut down when the moves and strength required took a leap. Conrad, notably, wasn’t at the setting event.
Talk was to peg these new problems to what we see at Hueco, home of the V-system, and few of the setters this weekend seemed willing to rate a route higher than v5. Routsetting tradition says that it’s easier to set an impossibly hard route than it is a moderately challenging one or an easy problem. Perhaps the setters’ shyness around setting >v6 was a means of insisting that a route is not that hard. Because if it’s a v7 but no one can do it, then it might not really be hard but just stupid, and no one wants to set a stupid route. Stout V5 wound up being the common grade, effectively bringing back the tradition of shutting out the higher grades by making the lowest of the higher unrealistically hard. Several routes were marked 6, but were not necessarily a click harder than the “stout 5s.”
Needless to say, we are happy to see new and creative problems in the gym, but hope that in the space between, Conrad and his crew set their style routes as well.
Or, ya know, maybe we just suck so much at climbing that real routes are too hard for us, and we need bouldering kindergarten. Quahtevah!
here’s a website we totally love that’s all about routsetting
arg is in the blogroll
