Trad climbing: the leader places the protection.

What trad climbing is

The BMC (British Mountaineering Council) defines traditional, or trad, climbing as climbing where the leader places their own protection on the way up and the second climber removes it while following. Wikipedia describes it the same way, as a form of free climbing with removable protection placed by the climber and taken out by the next climber up. The gear protects against a fall; it is not used to pull up on, which is what separates trad from aid climbing.

That is the main difference from sport climbing, where the protection is bolts already fixed in the rock. How protection is placed and removed is taught in person and is not described on this site.

The UIAA's 2018 single-pitch equipment list, from its Alpine Skills Summer Handbook, includes removable protection as an optional item alongside the helmet, harness, quickdraws, belay device, rope, locking carabiners, shoes and first aid. The cams and nuts and slings and anchors pages describe the gear and the standards it is tested to.

Trad on longer routes

Wikipedia notes that multi-pitch routes can be trad, sport or aid, and that on them climbers usually work in pairs, one leading each pitch while the other belays. The multi-pitch and big wall page covers those routes.

How trad routes are graded

Some grade systems used on trad routes rate seriousness as well as the hardest move. The British system is one.

The British two-part grade

The BMC describes UK trad grades as having two parts. The adjectival grade gives the overall difficulty, taking in seriousness, how sustained the climbing is, exposure and rock quality. The technical grade rates the hardest single move.

The BMC lists the adjectival grades in order: Easy, Moderate, Difficult, Hard Difficult, Very Difficult, Hard Very Difficult, Severe, Hard Severe, Very Severe, Hard Very Severe, then E1 and upward. It says the boundaries between them are subjective. Technical grades run from 4a to 7b in the BMC's list, and the BMC says that above about E2, extra difficulty tends to show up in the E grade rather than the technical grade.

The BMC gives typical pairings of the two parts, and calls them guidelines:

Sources disagree on the top of the scale. The BMC says the E grades currently reach E11. Wikipedia records E11 7a as the top in Britain and an E12 given to a route abroad, Bon Voyage.

Because British grades mix risk with difficulty, conversion charts differ most at this point. Mountain Project's chart, for example, pairs YDS 5.6 with S 4b, while the BMC's typical pairing for Severe is 4a. The grade comparison tables page sets the published charts side by side.

Risk and protection grades elsewhere

• The Yosemite Decimal System can add R and X suffixes to signal risk (Wikipedia, secondary). The CAI paper on grade scales notes that the YDS number itself usually rates only the hardest passage, not the protection or exposure.
• The CAI paper (Italian Alpine Club, hosted by the UIAA, undated) describes a protection-quality scale used next to technical grades in Italian and Swiss guidebooks: R1 to R6 for routes on removable gear, S1 to S6 for bolted routes and RS for a mix.

Headpoints

Gripped Magazine (Aaron Pardy, 7 July 2024) defines a headpoint as a lead after rehearsing the route on a top-rope, and says the term is used mostly for bold trad routes.

The UK's leader-placed tradition

The BMC says its bolting policy gives a framework for agreeing where drilled equipment is and is not acceptable in terms of climbing ethics, with the aim of safeguarding traditions and protecting the crag and mountain environment.

The BMC's 1992 national statement, as quoted on its ethics page, is reported to strongly support leader-placed protection using natural rock features, to limit drilled equipment to agreed quarried crags and agreed sections of some limestone crags, to oppose retrospective bolting, and to say that re-equipping should happen only by common consent at open forums. We could see that text only in a search summary, because the BMC ethics page returned an error, so its wording is unconfirmed. The BMC also says, in another search summary we could not confirm, that its donated bolts may be used only to re-equip existing sport routes, not to retro-bolt trad routes. The access and ethics page covers this in more detail.