One scale and nothing to convert into: a cable is graded by its crux, from K1 for a secured path to K6 for an overhang on rungs. The half step either way is how the source writes it.
| Hüsler, K1–K6 | 0 | 1− | 1 | 1+ | 2− | 2 | 2+ | 3− | 3 | 3+ | 4− | 4 | 4+ | 5− | 5 | 5+ | 6 |
|---|
1 637 cables on 961 mountains, each with a page of its own: the grade, the mountain it climbs, the country and the range. What a ferrata asks of you, and twenty-one of them worth the journey, is in the guide.
A via ferrata is a route fitted with iron: a steel cable the whole way, rungs, ladders and bridges instead of rope and gear. The first Italian one was made in 1880, when the guides of Madonna di Campiglio equipped the east face of Cima Brenta for their clients. The dense network in the Dolomites was left by the First World War: Italian units fixed cables and set ladders to move men and loads across the rock of the front.
Most are in Austria and France, 381 each, with 301 in Italy, and a few in the Crimean Mountains.
A cable carries one grade and that grade answers both questions at once, because on a ferrata they are the same question: K1 is a secured path, K6 an overhang on rungs. 14 of the cables here stand at the top of it. OpenStreetMap carries the scale per drawn segment, and some two hundred lines have several — somebody graded the easy approach apart from the wall — so the hardest of them stands for the line, which is how the scale is defined. The French letters A to E say the same thing in another alphabet; twenty cables carry one and it is left as it was written rather than converted.
Climbing routes — rope, gear and grades from F to ED — are counted apart, 20 730 of them in their own section.
