British Trad Grades in Sequence

If you climb trad in the UK, you've probably abandoned at least one logbook app because it asked you to pick a single grade for a route and none of the options were right.

I understand why apps do it. One grade per climb is a far easier thing to build. It's also wrong, and it throws away the most useful thing about the British system.

Two Grades, Two Jobs

The adjectival grade (Severe, HVS, E4) is doing the heavy lifting. It's the overall verdict on the route: how sustained it is, how much of a fight, how frightened you're likely to be, how good the gear is. The technical grade (5a, 6b) describes the hardest single move, and nothing else.

You need both, because the gap between them is the whole story. E1 5a and E1 5c are the same grade and completely different days out. One is probably bold and steady, the other has a crux you'll either do or you won't. Flatten them into one number and you've deleted the first thing an experienced trad climber looks at.

How It Works Now

Sequence logbooks support British Trad properly. Logging a route gives you two dropdowns: adjectival from Mod up to E12, technical from 3a to 8c. They're independent, and you can pick them in either order.

We built a version that only offered sensible pairings, then took it out again, because the sensible pairings are a guideline and the exceptions are the interesting bit. Diff 4c exists. Somebody out there has done an E2 4c. If you climbed it, you should be able to log it.

On mobile the technical column opens around where you'd expect for the adjectival grade you picked, with the neighboring grades in view. The common case is one tap and the odd case is a short scroll.

Everything Downstream Works

This isn't a display-only field. British Trad slots into the same ranking machinery as every other scale, so your pyramid, your stats, your filtering, your goals, and your personal bests all behave. Filter by E4 and you get every E4 regardless of tech grade. Filter by 6a and you get every route with that tech grade whatever sits in front of it. CSV import and export are unchanged.

Your existing logbooks are untouched. If you want to use it, add a Route logbook on the British Trad scale, or switch an existing one over, and start logging.