How it compares to what Alex Honnold achieved on The Nose? Difficulty or size is different?
They're both the best at what they do, but they do different things, and I don't think either of them could do what the other does.
http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/races-sports/alex-honno...
> People just assume I must be some great climber but I'm like, 'yeah but this is even harder than anything I've done.' It's really, really hard. The holds are just a little bit smaller and [a] little bit further apart.
You can check out the topos for each climb. This is the nose (http://www.supertopo.com/topos/yosemite/thenose.pdf [p15-16]), and you can see, with just a few exceptions, most of the pitches are graded 5.10 or easier.
This is the Dawn Wall (http://www.rockandice.com/dawn-wall-el-cap-yosemite-topo). It's much, much harder, particularly when you realize that the Yosemite Decimal System progresses like the Richter scale, in the sense that a step from 5.13a to 5.13b (an increase of 1 grade unit) is leaps and bounds harder to achieve than improving from, say, 5.8 to 5.9.
It's much, much harder, particularly when you realize
that the Yosemite Decimal System progresses like the
Richter scale, in the sense that a step from 5.13a to
5.13b (an increase of 1 grade unit) is leaps and bounds
harder to achieve than improving from, say, 5.8 to 5.9.
Climbing grades don't follow that, nor do they follow a linear pattern, (although they follow MORE closer to a linear pattern...). It's just that 5.10 is harder than 5.9; 5.13b is harder than 5.13a.
There's no mathematically exactitude over it. A 5.13b climb just "feels" harder than a 5.13a climb, and a consensus has been reached. YDS is after all, open ended. If it was logarithmic like the Richter scale, going from 5.13 to 5.14 (5.13a, b, c, d, then 5.14a) would be 100,000x more difficult, which obviously it is not. The original YDS from 5.0 to 5.9 were based on benchmark climbs (not in Yosemite, strangely enough).
Grades afterwards were added as things were getting a little crazy to be calling them, "5.9", so "5.10" was born. This also gives you the peculiarity where established 5.9 climbs are, "harder" than newer 5.10 climbs, and this repeats for 5.10d/5.11a; 5.11d/5.12a, as the scale kept going up.
Then you gotta remember that all the climbing areas in even just this country are geographically isolated, so a 5.9 in Eldorado Canyon is different than a 5.9 at Devil's Lake. Yosemite itself is known to be pretty stiff. Unless you're good at a particular style, then...
Anyways, it's a big mess, and it'll never be fixed. What Ondra is doing is pretty hard. Let's remember he's only 23.
It's like lots of things in sport, actually. Imagine the progression from running a 6 minute mile to a 5 minute mile to a 4 minute mile. Now go to a 3:55 from there. It's a much smaller notch than 6:00 to 5:00, but will take you ten years of training.
So sure, you can consider it just adding more weight to the bar in a linear fashion. It still a lot harder to lift each individual pound as the weight increases.
There's no objective way climbs are organized in difficulty except by subjective feeling. Holds may be (say) smaller, and/or farther apart, but the difficulty can only be sussed out in a general sense - there's far too many things to take into consideration.
Compounding all this is that a climb could be more/less difficult because of a climber's body type (tall/short climbers excel at different climbs)
So you're left with a consensus, which is living and breathing, not a calculation.
Those difficulty conversion are possibly way way off and this areas may attract particularly good climbers ... but my point is the scale is logarithmic in the sense of how many people can achieve each tick level.
Gill was a Math professor, so this is somewhat interesting to the discussion. He famously thought of boulders as, "problems", of course.
http://www.climbing.com/people/the-wright-stuff-the-art-of-t...