Jul 2, 2026 · 40 min · 12 segments
When the Protecting America's Rock Climbing (PARC) Act became law in 2025, it marked a historic win for climbers. Now comes the next step: the draft climbing management guidance that will put the law…
Jason KeithGuest
Erik MurdockHost
I just want to start off with this first question to help the audience understand, how did we get here? How did we get to where we are in 2026, where we're having Four different draft proposals issued by the federal government.
Can you sort of describe how the climbing community and our federal agencies got to this point?
I mean, there... goes all the way back to the 80s, really late 80s, early 90s, when there had been some proposed fixed anchor bans.
And actually, the Forest Service and the Sawtooth National Forest had issued a ban that was about to become a national ban.
And so we had been dealing with trying to manage fixed anchors primarily in wilderness areas across the country right at the same time that popularity of climbing was really increasing.
There was a lot more sort of pressure on the landscape, but no clarity really in the land management community about how How to manage these things? What are fixed anchors? What are the reasonable limits for new routes? How should they be used? How should they be placed and maintained? And we went through many different local controversies or issues.
prohibitions or management challenges in various places around the country, which led to even just more confusion.
So this had been an issue that had been going on, like I said, since at least the late 80s.
And the land management community had still yet to come to any kind of consensus about how to manage these things.
In the late 90s, the Forest Service conducted what's called a negotiated rulemaking, where a committee comes together and they try to come up with some consensus about how to manage these things.
That negotiated rulemaking at the end of the day didn't really come up with a final policy, but it did come up with a framework that sort of serves as the basis for the underlying policy of where we are now, which is, How do you deal with wilderness prohibitions, which prohibit the use of power drills because that's motorized equipment? How do you then manage the amount of climbing and how anchors are placed and maintained? And what that negotiated rulemaking basically came up with that got codified, so to speak, in some policies by the land management agencies was, basically says you can't have motorized drills in wilderness and there should not be any bolt-intensive climbs in wilderness and that they should be rare.
Now, all of those terms, except for the motorized beasts, are really subjective and have been sort of the basis for a debate ever since.
The Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service actually issued guidance in their various policy documents, whereas the Forest Service never actually got around to doing anything.
And even though we did get some national policy from the agencies, there was still a lot of difference in opinion amongst land managers at the local level.
Mostly, though, they were managed as necessary climbing tools and allowed in the places that we know the best, the Yosemites, right, the Wind River Mountains, those kind of places.
But there was still a lot of inconsistency about how these anchors were to be managed and should they even be allowed at all.
I just want to start off with this first question to help the audience understand, how did we get here? How did we get to where we are in 2026, where we're having Four different draft proposals issued by the federal government.
Can you sort of describe how the climbing community and our federal agencies got to this point?
I mean, there... goes all the way back to the 80s, really late 80s, early 90s, when there had been some proposed fixed anchor bans.
And actually, the Forest Service and the Sawtooth National Forest had issued a ban that was about to become a national ban.
And so we had been dealing with trying to manage fixed anchors primarily in wilderness areas across the country right at the same time that popularity of climbing was really increasing.
There was a lot more sort of pressure on the landscape, but no clarity really in the land management community about how How to manage these things? What are fixed anchors? What are the reasonable limits for new routes? How should they be used? How should they be placed and maintained? And we went through many different local controversies or issues.
prohibitions or management challenges in various places around the country, which led to even just more confusion.
So this had been an issue that had been going on, like I said, since at least the late 80s.
And the land management community had still yet to come to any kind of consensus about how to manage these things.
In the late 90s, the Forest Service conducted what's called a negotiated rulemaking, where a committee comes together and they try to come up with some consensus about how to manage these things.
That negotiated rulemaking at the end of the day didn't really come up with a final policy, but it did come up with a framework that sort of serves as the basis for the underlying policy of where we are now, which is, How do you deal with wilderness prohibitions, which prohibit the use of power drills because that's motorized equipment? How do you then manage the amount of climbing and how anchors are placed and maintained? And what that negotiated rulemaking basically came up with that got codified, so to speak, in some policies by the land management agencies was, basically says you can't have motorized drills in wilderness and there should not be any bolt-intensive climbs in wilderness and that they should be rare.
Now, all of those terms, except for the motorized beasts, are really subjective and have been sort of the basis for a debate ever since.
The Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service actually issued guidance in their various policy documents, whereas the Forest Service never actually got around to doing anything.
And even though we did get some national policy from the agencies, there was still a lot of difference in opinion amongst land managers at the local level.
Mostly, though, they were managed as necessary climbing tools and allowed in the places that we know the best, the Yosemites, right, the Wind River Mountains, those kind of places.
But there was still a lot of inconsistency about how these anchors were to be managed and should they even be allowed at all.
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