A redpoint in climbing means successfully leading a route from bottom to top without falling or resting on the rope, after having practiced or attempted the route before. You can try the route as many times as you need, rehearse individual moves, even top-rope it first. What matters is that your send attempt is one clean push: no falls, no hanging on gear, no weight on the rope.
How a Redpoint Works
The core rule is simple. You lead the route, clipping protection as you go, and your gear exists only as a safety net. If you fall at any point during the attempt, you lower back to the ground, pull your rope, and start over from scratch. You can’t pick up where you left off. That restart-from-the-bottom requirement is what separates a redpoint from “hangdogging,” where a climber hangs on the rope after a fall and continues upward without going back down.
You’re allowed to pause and rest during the climb, but only on the rock itself. Shaking out on a good hold, chalking up on a ledge, or slotting into a knee bar are all fair game. The moment your weight transfers to the rope or any piece of gear, the attempt is over.
Where the Term Comes From
German climber Kurt Albert coined the concept in 1975 in the Frankenjura region of Germany. At the time, many routes there had metal pitons hammered into the rock so climbers could pull on them as artificial aids. Albert began climbing these routes without using the pitons for anything but protection, then painting a small red dot (a “Roter Punkt,” or “Rotpunkt”) at the base to indicate the route had been climbed free. The Adolf-Rott-Gedächtnis-Weg was the first route to earn that red dot. The philosophy spread throughout Europe and eventually became the worldwide standard for how sport climbing ascents are measured.
Redpoint vs. Onsight vs. Flash
All three terms describe a clean lead ascent with no falls, but they differ in how much you knew beforehand.
- Onsight: You climb the route on your very first attempt with zero prior information. No beta from friends, no watching someone else climb it, no studying videos. This is widely considered the most impressive style of ascent.
- Flash: You climb the route on your first attempt, but you had some advance knowledge. Maybe a friend described the crux sequence, or you watched someone else send it.
- Redpoint: You’ve practiced the route before, whether that means failed lead attempts, top-roping it, or spending sessions rehearsing individual sections. The send might come on your second try or your fiftieth.
A redpoint typically refers to a route that pushed you close to your limit, something hard enough that you couldn’t just walk up and climb it clean. That’s the whole point: the route required a process of learning and refinement before you could put it all together.
The Projecting Process
Most redpoints come at the end of a deliberate process called “projecting.” You pick a route at or above your current ability and systematically work it until you can send. The early attempts are called “working burns,” and they’re less about sending and more about gathering information: figuring out which holds to grab, where to place your feet, where you can shake out and recover.
Experienced climbers don’t focus only on the hardest section. The easier “filler” moves between cruxes determine how pumped your forearms will be when you hit the difficult parts. Dialing in efficient movement on these sections can make or break a send. For complex crux sequences, trying half a dozen or more variations of holds and body positions is common before settling on the approach that works best for your body.
A useful tactic during projecting is “low-pointing,” which means linking progressively longer sections of the route from the bottom up to the anchors. If you can do every move individually but keep falling when you try to link them, low-pointing builds the endurance and flow you need to connect everything. Once you’ve identified rest positions, refined your sequences, and built confidence in each section, you go for the redpoint burn: ground up, no falls, clean to the top.
Redpoint vs. Pinkpoint
In Kurt Albert’s original definition, a redpoint required the climber to place all protection during the ascent. On a sport climb, that meant clipping your own quickdraws to each bolt as you climbed past it. In the 1990s and 2000s, the term “pinkpoint” emerged to describe sending a route with quickdraws already hanging on the bolts, since pre-placed draws save energy and time.
That distinction has largely disappeared. Many sport crags now have permanent quickdraws (called permadraws) fixed to the wall, and climbers routinely hang their draws on a route during practice sessions and leave them for the send attempt. In modern sport climbing, sending with pre-placed quickdraws counts as a redpoint. The pinkpoint label still surfaces occasionally in trad climbing, where leading a route with gear pre-placed in the cracks is meaningfully easier than placing it on the fly, but even there the term is fading.
Pre-Clipping and Gray Areas
One ongoing ethical conversation involves pre-clipping: threading your rope through one or more quickdraws before you leave the ground. Having the first bolt pre-clipped is widely accepted, especially when the opening moves are dangerous or the first bolt sits high above the ground. Two or three pre-clipped draws are more controversial but sometimes seen on routes with difficult starts and widely spaced bolts. The climbing scorecard site 8a.nu, which tracks ascents globally, flags pre-clipped sends with a “yellow card” rather than disqualifying them outright.
Where the community draws a hard line is excessive pre-clipping. Starting an attempt with ten or more draws already clipped effectively turns the lead into a top-rope, since falls become negligible. Most climbers wouldn’t consider that a valid redpoint. The general consensus: one pre-clip for safety is fine, and beyond that the ethics get murkier depending on the route and the community around it.
Why Redpointing Matters
When climbers report their hardest grade, they’re almost always talking about a redpoint. It represents the ceiling of what you can physically climb, given enough time to learn the route. Onsights and flashes are impressive in a different way, highlighting reading ability and composure, but redpoints are how climbers push into new territory. A climber who onsights at 5.12b might redpoint at 5.13a or harder, because the projecting process lets them squeeze out maximum performance on a single piece of rock.
The gap between your onsight grade and your redpoint grade says something about your climbing. A large gap suggests you benefit heavily from rehearsal and might need to work on route-reading or managing pump on unfamiliar terrain. A small gap means you climb efficiently even without preparation. Both numbers matter, but the redpoint is the one that defines the upper edge of your ability.