Mile End

So today I went to Mile End again with three other CUMCers. One of them, Alex, mentioned that he had been to Boston when I told him where I was from. He then managed to launch into a speech about the Freedom Trail that was really remarkably similar to Nick's standard monologue on it.

Mile End was as expected. I just bouldered while we were there. Interestingly, though, it seems to have comicly misinterpreted a suggestion. So, here's the deal. Mile End, in theory, uses a color grading system where the color of the taped tags is supposed to indicate the difficulty of the route. Now, in theory, I don't have a problem with this system, and I understand the rationale behind it (to emphasize that you can't compare indoor and outdoor climbing, or really the climbing at one gym to that at any other). However, in practice, these systems never work that well because they cover too broad ranges of grades, and they are also often a proxy for other issues with the gym.

So my impression (in seeing the aftermath) is that someone suggested to Mile End that they grade the problems with the V-scale rather than set by color alone. The problem is how Mile End put this suggestion into implementation. What it did was print a number of plane white tags with a V grade written on them. It then set a bunch of problems on a set of wall with these tags. So, for example, every hold on the V3 problem had a tag on it that said "V3" on it -- making it difficult to distinguish from the other problems on the wall that also all had white tags with a small V grade printed on them. These replaced the colored tags that were the old setup.

So what has happened in practice is that it is now even more impossible to figure out what's supposed to be on route (and believe me, it didn't use to be easy). Annoyingly, the gym also seems to, in practice, set the routes by color-of-hold, too, bringing up all the issues that go along with that that I won't even go into. So these tags give the gym the ability to set two routes of the same color next to each other and have the only thing distinguishing them be the number on the tag. How does England even manage to come up with such things?