New to climbing outside

Go with someone who's done it

Every guide service and club we checked gives the same first advice, and it isn't a crag or a grade. It's a person.

• The Mountain Guides: book a guided day or an intro course first.
• Colorado Mountain Club: a day at the crag, prerequisite “None”. They lead, you climb and belay.
• Petzl: “Training is essential.”

We don't rank guide services and nobody pays us. Nothing on this page is instruction.

What's different outside

• The grade is only the moves. It says nothing about whether there's gear, whether the gear is any good, or how you get down. What the ratings mean.
• Outdoor grades are stiffer, and they vary between areas. One guide service suggests two to three grades below your gym level. No standards body publishes a figure. Eldorado Canyon is known for stiff grades.
• Easy doesn't mean safe. At Eldorado Canyon State Park, about two thirds of climbing accidents happened on routes 5.8 or easier, from the park's own records reported by the American Alpine Club. Most of the traffic is on easy routes, so that doesn't make easy routes riskier. It does mean the grade buys you nothing.
• Most of the danger isn't the climbing. In fourteen years of Boulder County rescue records, 34% of casualties weren't roped up and 43% weren't injured at all, just stuck or lost. Anchors failing: 2.5%. The risk sits in getting the rope up, getting down, and moving about at the cliff.
• “Top-rope only” is not the safe option it sounds like. Someone still has to lead the route or walk to the top to rig it. Of our top-rope routes that carry a protection rating, 71% are rated R or X, against 55% of rated routes generally. The tag usually means “don't lead this”.
• Agree how you're getting down before you leave the ground. Running out of rope while lowering is one of the commonest ways this goes wrong. A knot in the end costs nothing.

None of this is about being new. It catches people out at every level of experience.

What we don't know

This list ranks walls by how much easy climbing they hold, which is not the same as how friendly it is. Most of what would tell you that isn't in our data:

• Whether it's one pitch or six, or how long the route is. We hold a pitch count for 1 route out of 30,089.
• What's at the top. An anchor type for 21 routes. We can't tell you whether you can be lowered off, or whether one rope reaches the ground.
• The walk in, or what the ground at the base is like. An approach time for 14 crags out of 2,256.
• Whether anyone has checked a route for danger. 17% of easy routes carry a protection rating, and we hold no G ratings at all. No rating means nobody looked, not that it's fine.

We'd rather show you the gap than guess at it.

• Climbing with someone much stronger than you
• Sun and shade by season — being cold or roasted is the commonest way a first day stops being fun.