Jcb890
Active member
We're just being tongue-in-cheek jackasses about it all and laying on the sarcasm nice and thick.My local hill has a double black diamond pitch.
While I agree it's kind of ridiculous, that one pitch, although short, is significantly steeper than anything else on the hill and the conditions can be very sketchy, so rating it as harder than everything else makes sense.
Trail ratings in general seem to be best used for mountain-by-mountain rather than as a standard across all mountains or even in the same geographical area.
Like my example of Wachusett - their black diamonds are steeper than any of their other trails and conditions are usually sketchy (icy). However, the black diamonds at Wachusett are certainly not equivalent to a black diamond at Killington, Jay, Cannon, etc.