Trail grades

Hiking trails are usually marked trails (maintained and equipped with safety equipment) that do not involve any specific climbing/mountaineering techniques in order to be traveled. Hikes that spread across multiple days and involve camping, are also known as trekking or backpacking. There are a few aspects that are relevant in order to determine the difficulty of such trails, such as the physical effort to which we are subjected, the areas at risk of falling from the path and the level of stress caused by the exposed passages.

Grading

We evaluate the trails according to three objective criteria:

• The difference in altitude level
• The exposure of the passages
• The frequency of the exposed passages

Climbing trails are trails through difficult terrain in high mountains, without an obvious path. They involve different rock climbing passages as well as other mountaineering techniques, and are not marked (nor equipped/maintained).

Carpathian trails (a.k.a carpatism)

In Romania, there are also the so-called carpathian trails which were named - similarly to alpine trails - based on the mountain range that they are crossing. These are trails that border between hiking and rock climbing. Some of them may be closer to hiking (brane/brauri) while others more closely resemble rock climbing (steep valleys/vai de abrupt). In general, the areas traveled are not equipped for tourists. For the classification of the Carpathian routes, we will use, when the situation requires it, the gradings used in rock climbing.

Grading

In rock climbing, mountaineering, and other climbing disciplines, climbers give a grade to a climbing route, intended to describe concisely the difficulty and danger of climbing it. Different types of climbing have their own grading systems, and many nationalities developed their own, distinctive grading systems.

There are a number of factors that contribute to the difficulty of a climb, including the technical difficulty of the moves, the strength, stamina and level of commitment required, and the difficulty of protecting the climber. Different grading systems consider these factors in different ways, so no two grading systems have an exact one-to-one correspondence.

At international level, two ratings are used for technical climbing steps, namely the UIAA scale, with grades between I and XII, and the French scale, with grades from 1 to 9, both with subdivisions. These grades are given to the individual steps of each length in a route. In addition to these technical quotations, we also use an overall quotation, namely the classic Romanian grades, from 1 to 7, also with subdivisions.