Gut-busta or Sunday Stroll - How do you grade a trip?
People frequently ask how hard a particular trip is going to be. This is a exceedingly difficult question for anyone to answer, firstly everyone has a different perception as to difficulty, and secondly the respective difficulty of a trip can vary according to fitness, experience and the weather conditions.
The issue of perception of difficulty is crucial. The fact that people have different views as to how hard they found a particular trip should be respected. We all have our own little ‘Mount Everest’s’. No one should ever be made to feel inferior because they only did what some person considers an ‘easy trip". Any macho mountain man or woman, for that matter, who does this, is only massaging their ego to make up their own obvious lack of self-esteem.
With that little lesson in humility and personal respect let us return to the issue of grading trips. Obviously all trips are different, and some are more difficult than others. The real question one must ask when trying to grade trips is what makes one trip more difficult than another. After discussion with several people I came up with the following list of factors, altitude gained, the terrain/technical skills required to pass through that terrain and the overall time spent tramping. Weather and seasonal conditions have an impact on this as well, but alas one cannot predict these months in advance. The Met Service would pay me mega bucks if I could!
The result is that I have re-classified and expanded the gradings given to trips. From now on there will be ten different overall levels of trips, cruisy-easy, cruisy-medium, cruisy-hard, medium-easy, medium, medium-hard, keen-easy, keen-medium, keen-hard and mountaineering. For each trip there is an approximate estimate of the altitude gained each day and the time spent walking. In addition is a list of technical skills/experience that you need, or will experience on the trip. Many of these skills with the exception of river-crossing & ice axe/crampon skills can be picked up by simply going on the trip. However if the technical skills/terrain is going to be difficult then it would be advisable to do some trips where those skills can be put into practice in a ‘learning’ environment; i.e. where the technical skill is not too difficult to master, e.g. easy route-finding.
Here is a brief overview of the gradings. Times reflect the total time out tramping and not necessarily total time walking though this maybe the case in harder trips.
Cruisy
Normally between four to six hours. Within the capabilities of virtually everyone. Examples:
Cruisy-easy A walk on the Port Hills
Cruisy-medium A walk on Banks Peninsula, E.g. Mount Herbert. Or Bealey Spur.
Cruisy-hard A walk up one of the easier Canterbury foothills such as Mt Richardson
Medium
Normally between six to eight hours. Medium-easy & medium tramps should be within the capabilities of most people. You will end the day feeling physically tired and like you’ve had a good days exercise. Medium-hard trips are more challenging, go through more difficult terrain and less breaks. Examples:
Medium-easy A walk up Mt Oxford
Medium The Cass-Lagoon Saddle loop, Casey-Binser, Avalanche Peak in summer.
Medium-hard Avalanche Peak- Crow Valley, Castle Hill Peak
Keen
In excess of eight hours. Quick pace, shorter stops and rougher terrain.
Keen-easy Mt Binser
Keen-medium Waimak Col.
Keen-hard Untracked trips on the West Coast
My trip gradings generally err on the conservative side. Though weather or your personal level of fitness may influence this. They are based on my personal experiences, the general level of fitness of people who go on club trips and an assessment of the likely conditions at the time. Where I have not personally walked the track then I will put "approximated from guide" at the bottom of the grade.
Technical skills include, gravel bashing, boulder hopping, river-crossings, steep terrain, scree running, scrub bashing and ridge travel. They can be in varying levels of difficulty and this is generally noted in the trip rating.
Finally a word on altitude gain. A gain of up to 500m in a day will leave most people feeling tired. You will really feel a gain of over 1000m+ in a day particularly with a heavy pack. Anything 1300m+ will make you feel really worn out if you are of average fitness.
Remember these gradings are based on what the average CUTC tramper in my opinion would feel like! I.e. average fitness, average skill level and average scare factor!
Hopefully these improved gradings will give you a better idea of what to expect, so that the club can lower the expectation gap to an acceptable level between what people expect a trip to be like, and how it actually turns out. Reassessing gradings will be an ongoing process so please feel free to give me your thoughts at meetings.
Darren