Climbers are celebrating a first-ever national plan for managing rock climbing on federal land that abandons a previous plan that would have banned anchors in wilderness areas.
The draft plan — guidance the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service published two weeks ago — is part of the Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act, or PARC Act, which was included in the unanimous passage of the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experiences Act, or EXPLORE Act, by Congress last year.
The PARC Act, supported by U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse and Sen. John Hickenlooper, requires federal land managers to develop uniform policies across all land agencies that protect rock climbing anchors as an appropriate use in wilderness areas. It marks the first-ever attempt to craft a national policy for climbing, which for decades has been managed by individual forests and parks. The legislation was born from a controversial park service plan that gave local land managers greater ability to ban climbing anchors in wilderness.
Climber outrage with that initial proposal — the Access Fund called it “a war on wilderness climbing” — and the passage of the EXPLORE Act eventually led the park service to kill the two-year overhaul of climbing policy in December 2024.
Erik Murdock, the deputy director of policy and government affairs at the Access Fund, applauds the PARC Act and the federal government’s efforts to streamline climbing policy. But there are some problems with the new guidance and the Access Fund is mobilizing its more than 20,000 members and 130 local climbing organizations to write the four federal agencies with suggestions.
For example, the Access Fund is concerned that the BLM’s framework for hand-placing anchors in wilderness — limited to fewer than five and not within 100 feet of other “human-placed objects” — could use more clarity, Murdock said. But mostly, it’s about climbers making sure their voice is heard in the process.
“I think the climbing community recognizes that these plans don’t get written all the time and whatever happens will really be the backdrop for how climbing is managed for decades,” Murdock said.
Wilderness advocates blasted the PARC Act as a weakening of the 1964 Wilderness Act by allowing human-made installations — fixed anchors — in wilderness areas. Wilderness advocates argued the anchors would open doors to mountain bikes, trail races, commercial filming and airplanes. The national Wilderness Watch group said the PARC Act was “the proverbial crack in the Wilderness Act’s armor and a harbinger of what’s to come.”
The PARC Act’s permission to install anchors in wilderness — using hand-drills instead of motorized tools prohibited in wilderness areas — is “a wild exercise in circular reasoning,” said Dana Johnson with Wilderness Watch in an email. “And now the agencies have been tasked with contortionism to make sense of the absurd in their new climbing directives, and it shows.”
The PARC Act distinguishing fixed anchors from prohibited constructed features upsets decades of wilderness management by the Forest Service, Johnson said.
The recent dismantling of federal land agencies and the reduction of staffing will limit the development and enforcement of climbing management plans in specific regions, Johnson argued, saying it could lead to “more outsourcing of the agencies’ wilderness administrative duties to third parties (climbing groups in this case and commercial outfitters in others,) who have substantial conflicts of interests.”
Johnson said the PARC Act allows on-the-ground land managers to protect wilderness “should they choose to,” instead of mandating strict adherence to the venerable Wilderness Act.
“But those line officers are trying to do their jobs with limited resources and under an administration that has an access-above-all-else agenda,” Johnson said. “It’s a real mess, and it doesn’t appear the agency climbing guidance is going to do much to protect wilderness or the few remaining wilderness officers left to defend it.”
The comment period for the new guidance runs through July 20 for the Forest Service and Aug. 14 for the National Park Service, BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service.
The initial plan proposed by the Forest Service in 2023 harvested more than 9,000 comments. Review the National Park Service climbing policy plan and offer comments here.
Review the BLM climbing policy plan and offer comments here.
Review the Forest Service draft guidance and offer comments here.