New Wilderness Management Proposals Could Render Every Climb on El Cap Illegal

Despite overtly acknowledging that climbing is an appropriate use of wilderness land, two new proposals, one from the National Forest Service, another from the National Park Service, would give land administrators the tools to unravel America’s wilderness climbing legacy.

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The basics: Late last week, the National Park Service (NPS) and National Forest Service (NFS) released draft climbing management directives that would render all fixed anchors in wilderness illegal until each anchor can be individually reviewed by under-resourced land management agencies. The public has 60 days (from November 17) to comment on the proposals here and here. You can write your congressional representative to support the Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act here.

How it works: Both the NPS and NFS directives explicitly acknowledge that climbing is a legitimate use of wilderness. But both of them go on to propose that “fixed anchors”—a term which encompasses all forms of permanent or left-behind protection, including everything from bolts and rap rings to slung trees, stuck nuts, and snow pickets—should be categorized as “installations,” a term historically used to describe objects like paved roads, fire towers, buildings, bridges, and landfills. According to the 1964 Wilderness Act, installations are ipso facto prohibited in wilderness, but they can be permitted on a case-by-case basis through a process called a minimum requirement analysis (MRA).

What this means: With these plans, the NPS and NFS essentially propose a guilty until proven innocent structure for anchors. Instead of assuming that anchors are permitted but subject to approval, the directives assume that every anchor in wilderness—even those that predate the Wilderness Act—is illegal, and therefore subject to either removal or non-replacement, until the local land manager finds the time and budget to conduct an MRA and decide their final fate. 

While climbing organizations like Access Fund agree that the placement of anchors (particularly bolts) in wilderness should be overseen by land managers, they oppose the idea that anchors ought to be considered illegal unless proven otherwise. “In the past, the way climbers have used anchors in wilderness has been allowable unless they’re causing [negative] impacts,” says Erik Murdock, Interim Executive Director of Access Fund. “But this is flipped on its head. If this proposal passes, all fixed anchors will be considered illegal until they are provided an exception. The wilderness administrator can provide that exception. But they may not if they don’t want to.”

How will administrators decide which anchors are allowed? Both proposals note that climbing is a legitimate activity in wilderness and that wilderness administrators ought to take this legitimacy into account when conducting their MRAs. This essentially means that they would weigh climbing’s public value and historical relevance at any given crag against its perceived impacts on a climbing area’s “wilderness character.” This subjective process is likely to lead to significant inconsistency from year to year and wilderness area to wilderness area. The Dawn Wall: yes. Sarchasm: no. Or vice versa. 

Does this mean that in two months El Cap will be closed? No. The directive explicitly states that climbing will continue to be allowed on existing anchors until those anchors can be subjected to an MRA. 

What we still don’t know: Given the fact that land managers are woefully understaffed and under-resourced, and given the fact that the process of proving a given anchor’s compatibility with wilderness will require significant time and resources from those land managers, it’s unclear how the NPS and NFS realistically expect to weigh in on the tens of thousands of routes that currently sit within the wilderness areas they administer. Will they wait until a climber or local climbing organization identifies an anchor that needs replacing, then conduct an MRA about the replacement and go from there? Or will they take a more active approach—as recommended by the NPS managers in Joshua Tree last year—and actively search out routes and anchors they randomly deem non-compliant and chop them? 

An avenue for lawsuits: Another implication is legal. Things defined as “installations” in a wilderness context are subject to lawsuits. Any user—or any anti-climbing wilderness organization—can point at an installation that has not undergone an MRA and sue for its removal. This same legal mechanism was used by Wilderness Watch in 2010 to condemn an 80-year-old fire tower in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington. Despite the fact that the tower both pre-dated the Wilderness Act and had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1988, the tower was ultimately condemned by a federal judge and slated for removal—only to be saved by an act of federal legislation (introduced by one of Washington’s senators and signed into law by President Obama) that superseded the judge’s ruling. If the installation definition were to be applied to bolts, slings, pitons, rap anchors, and so on, groups like Wilderness Watch could use the same mechanism to gradually strip necessary anchors from Yosemite, the Black Canyon, the Tetons, Acadia, and thousands of other federally administered wilderness crags around the country. 

Which brings us to another topic: 

There is a legislative solution to this: The Protecting America’s Rock Climb Act (PARC), which is explicitly designed to ensure sustainable climbing access in designated wilderness, enjoys significant bipartisan support. If passed, it would force both the NFS and NPS to explicitly allow the regulated use, placement, and maintenance of fixed anchors in wilderness areas, and would prohibit all federal land management agencies from fundamentally disallowing standard climbing practices and protection in wilderness. Want to support wilderness climbing? Write to your congressional representatives here.

Who the heck is behind this anyway? The NFS’s proposal, which is admittedly less fluent than the proposal produced by the NPS, at one point notes that a “Forest Supervisor may authorize the placement or replacement of fixed anchors and fixed equipment in wilderness… in areas where impacts on the rock face are occurring due to the use of rock hammers to chip hand holds or foot holds into the rock.” 

Italics mine because what in the nine circles of hell do they even mean?

Is the forest service really suggesting that the climbers—a largely self-policing and conservation-minded community whose constituents unanimously agree that chipping handholds and footholds is the opposite of what we want to see happening on our rock—just need to start chipping in order to justify our rappel anchors? Or was this document written and edited by someone whose knowledge of climbing history and climbing ethics is so mediocre that they conflated the chipping controversies of the late 1980s with the clean climbing revolution that began with Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost, and Doug Robinson in the early 1970s and has largely guided our wider community’s relationship to rock ever since? Either way, it’s pretty shoddy work on the part of the Forest Service. And it’s pretty frightening to think that these people are in charge of climbing’s past and its future. 

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