The Top 10% of Climbers: Mountain Project Data
Mountain Project Climbing Grade Percentiles
In rock climbing there are “Grades” of a route which measure it’s difficulty - each one incrementally more difficult than the last. I was curious about the distribution of grades achieved by climbers, what constitutes an ‘average’ grade achieved, and what puts someone in a high percentile of climbing ability.
Whenever this type of discussion is brought up in the climbing community several issues with the premise are brought up. Climbing grades are very subjective - a climb may be easier for a taller person than a shorter person, or a climb may suit one person’s specific styles. To add more complexity, that subjectivity changes as you travel. A 5.9 in the Gunks will be very different than a 5.9 in Boulder Canyon. Finally, the style of how you protect yourself while climbing matters considerably. People will typically climb harder while Sport climbing than while Trad climbing.
By looking at the climbers rather than the climbs, and by siloing by crag and type, we can get a good idea of the range of abilities climbers who report ticks on Mountain Project have (for a specific crag+type). If we do this for several crags of the same type perhaps a pattern will emerge.
Methodology:
Using object oriented programming in Python, with packages including pandas and Beautiful Soup, I scraped climbing data from Mountain Project - a website dedicated to store self reported climbing data. This data includes all climbs in North America by crag along with their associated difficult. Additionally, we can look at the users who report their ticks and grab all there send data. Link to full source code here: https://github.com/shaunmac611/cliffs_lic_data
Using this data, we can define a climber for a particular crag as someone who has tracked at least 4 sends in Mountain Project at the crag. Then, for each climber in a crag, we can define their ‘Top Consistent Climbing Grade’ as the average of their top 10 hardest sends. We can then do a cumulative summary on these Top Consistent Climbing Grades, from easiest to hardest, and take a percentage of the whole. This will give us a percentile associated with each grade for that crag specifically.
Limitations:
I believe this will likely skew towards higher skilled climbers - while the best climbers in the world likely aren’t adding their ticks, it’s likely that there are a larger number of climbers who are new to the sport that are not reporting. However, due to the sheer quantity of climbers it should be a reasonable estimate.
Results:
We take 5 very popular climbing crags: Boulder Canyon, New River Gorge, Red Rocks, Rumney, and Red River Gorge. For each we pull all the climbers who have ever ticked a send marked as ‘Sport’ at that location. For each climber we take their top 10 hardest sport ticks in that area and average them:
How to read: If you consistently climb 5.11d in Boulder Canyon you are in the 91st percentile of climbers in Boulder Canyon (i.e. the top 9% of climbers)
The distribution was surprisingly tight, and aligned reasonably close to my intuition about how grades are distributed, Since they are close to each other, it may be interesting to take the average of each crag (not weighted by total climbers, each crag represented equally) to get an idea of a more general distribution
An average of the distribution for the 5 crags. This can give us an idea of the average North American grade distribution for sport climbing, and based on percentile of climbers we can group climbers in to approximate buckets:
5.5-5.9: New to the sport
5.10: About average, somewhere between top 25%-50%
5.11: Advanced in the sport, likely in the top 10%-20% of climbers
5.12: An elite in the sport, in the top 10% of climbers
5.13: One of the best in the USA, in the top 1%
Now we can repeat the same analysis but for locations that primarily have trad climbing, and filter only on ticks that were labeled as Trad:
Note: Trad climbing grades have several additional layer of complexity, including protection rating, sections of aid climbing, and can be several pitches in length. Everything is included here without additional consideration which causes the band to be slightly wider for trad climbing
Similarly, we see pretty tight banding among crags. However trad climbs tend to be more difficult than sport climbs, so the banding is farther left than in sport climbing.
Similar to sport, we can average the crags and create a band. We can compare this band to sport climbing grades:
The band for Lead Climbers is farther left than the band for Sport climbers. Lead climbing requires additional technical skills and can often be a bit scarier to accomplish. Lead climbing People may be less likely to push their grade, so those that do quickly rise to higher percentiles
Conclusion:
While I acknowledge climbing grades are subjective, and using grades as the only metric for success in climbing is a recipe for disaster, I find it really interesting to read the above charts and was surprised how closely different crags aligned - especially with sport climbers. It’s possible this is the natural growth of a climber, there is an intuition that at each grade it becomes harder to enter the next and people often cite diminishing returns on training at higher levels. It’s also possible each community is adjusting around their perceptions, perhaps this grading scale is inevitable for any given crag but crag to crag comparisons are still not valid.
Some additional thoughts:
I didn’t analyze Top Rope because there are very few ‘Top Rope Crags’ and very few people advertise their ‘Best Top Rope Grade’
Crags with larger communities may be more likely to tend towards this national norm seen above, while crags with smaller communities may be more likely to have their own specific interpretation of grades that lie outside the bands
One interpretation of a crags distribution being farther to the left is that it is “sand bagged” and farther to the right is “softer”. This is likely at least one factor, but it’s also possible that different crags attract different levels of abilities or different communities grade things differently
I would assume there is a gap between climbing in the gym and climbing outside that is not represented here, I’d imagine a similar Gym analysis would create a band even further to the right but Mountain Project doesn’t have climbing gyms and climbing gym guests may be less likely to self report their grades
Having said that, my local climbing gym does have data on a different app, Vertical Life, and I was able to do a similar analysis and compare it to the other crags (see below, gym is red dashed line)
This includes Top Rope sends, as most users don’t differentiate between top rope and sport so I pulled all of it equally
Interestingly enough, it aligns quite well with our sports climbing. It’s likely that the setters reference outdoor grades when assigning grades in the gym.
