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To be honest this is very much a bouldering/rock-climbing question but hardly a question about the outdoors. Let me know if there is a better home for it.

It seems like it should be very easy for indoor gyms to synthesize boulder problems that match or exceed the v17 grade. Although only a handful of people on the entire planet would be able to do them, certainly they could be "attempted".

I was surprised that I couldn't find a SINGLE example of this across google and youtube outside of 3D printing the holds of Burden of Dreams and mounting them on a correctly angled wall.

Why hasn't this been done yet?

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  • 21
    I suppose it might make for a bit of PR, but putting up bouldering problems that nobody in your gym can actually do doesn't sound like a promising business plan.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Sep 10 at 19:50
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    How would the setters know it is V18? What IS V18?
    – noah
    Commented Sep 11 at 2:28
  • That's hard to know. I guess setting up burden of dreams, a known V17, and setting it to a steeper angle (I.E. more parallel to the ground) would be objectively harder. Perhaps there is some angle that makes that a V18 (or V17+) and that can serve as a bench mark for other climbs
    – Sidharth Ghoshal
    Commented Sep 11 at 5:08
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    You'd have to set something that no one can do, and if no one can do it how can you grade it? The V17's that have been done have taken many attempts over multiple sessions. You have to leave something on the wall for months that no one would climb. Gyms rarely go above v10/11 because the number of customers who can climb that hard is tiny, and they take up space on the wall.
    – Dave Smith
    Commented Sep 12 at 12:12
  • Why not make a v100? Insert foto of naked wall - oh wait, I already did.
    – DonQuiKong
    Commented Sep 14 at 13:47

2 Answers 2

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There are two reasons:

  1. so far nobody really agrees what V18 would look like We only have a handful of V17 boulders, so it will take some time to agree on where the upper limit of V17 is. Route setter John from a random climbing gym surely is not qualified to give any judgment on that
  2. what would be the point of setting a boulder that nobody can climb and probably only a handful of people will even get the first move? Gyms - no matter whether purely commercial or operated by an alpine club - rely on customers having fun and coming back. If even the best customers can't get off the ground, that is just a waste of wall space

As an addendum...setting something extremely hard is easy. Just take the smallest holds you can find and set them far apart at a steep angle. Setting something that is extremely hard and interesting to climb is much harder. A few years ago, Eric Karlsson made some videos about setting the (probably) world's hardest indoor route. It gives a lot of insight what goes into making a very hard route. And keep in mind that a route allows to increase the difficulty section by section, therefore allowing at least some climbers to get up some part. While a boulder condenses all the difficulty in a very short section.

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Likely there is nothing stopping gyms to set very difficult routes/walls. But unless there are enough very good climbers using this gym it will not be commercially viable.

And as there are no set rules for v18 (according to the information in the question and one of its comments) advertising as v18 is likely not following the rules of the sport of the governing body as they stand or at least showing the gym as not following the rules.

It is way more likely that v16 and v17 (I assume that are current very difficult standards) routes will become more used and that extra difficult versions of that become available after which someone will decide an upgrade of the rules is needed and some walls/routes will be judged to be in that new grade.

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    A tiny house can fit all of the V16 climbers in the world for a relaxed dinner party. As a rule of thumb, legitimate V10 climbs are probably the entry level for pro climbers. Each grade after is roughly twice as difficult. By the way, there are no set rules for any grade. Difficulty grades combine the feeling of insecurity with technical and physical difficulty, and they hope that this one number will apply across human geometries (which it does a surprising amount).
    – user121330
    Commented Sep 13 at 23:18

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