The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is seeking public comment on proposed guidance for recreational rock climbing in our national parks, national wildlife refuges, and BLM-administered public lands, including guidance required by the EXPLORE Act for climbing in Wilderness. You may recall that the U.S. Forest Service recently proposed guidance for recreational climbing on our national forests. Thank you to everyone who commented during that comment period. Now, we need you to speak up again—by August 14—to defend the Wilderness Act and America’s National Wilderness Preservation System! Wilderness and wildlife are under relentless pressures at this moment in history, including from exploding demand for outdoor recreation. Natural limits are essential to protecting Wilderness. Some background information: The PARC Act, incorporated into the EXPLORE Act—which was signed into law on January 4, 2025—is a messy piece of legislation that attempted a de facto amendment of the Wilderness Act to benefit the recreational climbing industry. The Wilderness Act is straight-forward—installations, including permanent fixed climbing anchors, are prohibited unless absolutely necessary to meet the minimum requirements for administering Wilderness. But the PARC Act/EXPLORE Act says that permanent recreational bolting is an appropriate use in Wilderness when undertaken in compliance with the Wilderness Act—a wild exercise in circular reasoning—and now the agencies are tasked with making sense of the absurd in their new climbing directives. While some of the language in the proposed DOI guidance is good, the guidance is undermined by a few serious flaws. First, the guidance attributes DOI’s strained legal interpretation of fixed anchors to the Wilderness Act when it should be attributed to the PARC Act/EXPLORE Act. The guidance also casts DOI’s wilderness preservation obligations under the Wilderness Act as discretionary rather than required. Furthermore, the guidance suggests that only certain fixed anchors are allowable, but provides little to no guidance on the scope, function, and placement of such allowable anchors, nor does it make the development of climbing management plans mandatory. Any implication that the Wilderness Act’s prohibitions can be overcome by the desire to enhance recreation is not only flawed, but also ushers wilderness administration to the precarious edge of a slippery slope. Wilderness administering agencies are facing a crossroads. The outdoor recreation industry, and its influence on public land management, is booming, and outdoor recreation pressures that were once front-country issues are pushing steadily into our most protected places. Meanwhile, agency wilderness programs are underfunded and deprioritized, wilderness-trained staff are stretched thin, and wilderness departments are increasingly subsumed by recreation departments. Combine these issues with decades of agency equivocation over permanent fixed climbing anchors in Wilderness, and you have the untenable situation at hand: exploding demand for developed recreational climbing, proposed agency guidance that confuses statutory language on prohibitions in Wilderness, and wilderness staff lacking resources to effectively protect Wilderness. In this context, we need defenders of the Wilderness Act and America’s National Wilderness Preservation System to take action!
The three agencies within the DOI are accepting public comments through this Friday, August 14. We know it’s cumbersome, but comments must be submitted individually to each agency via the following links: - National Park Service: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/NPS-2026-0101-0001
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FWS-HQ-NWRS-2026-1618-0001
- Bureau of Land Management: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/BLM-2026-0034-0001
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