Off the Wall

A rational approach

12 Does Climbing Need More Rules?

The subject of regulating climbing is anathema to most every climber. Suggesting anything that takes away the perceived freedom is almost enough to incite climbers to grab their stick clips and storm the gates. Reasons why land managers and park planners should take a more active role in regulating climbing have recently been raised which include the increase in rescues and concern over covid-19 at crowded crags.

To this list, we can also add the lack of regulatory oversight and management of climbing in national parks. Sport climbs, both single- and multi-pitch, continue to be put up in increasing numbers. The most recent additions in late 2020 were two routes on Mount Rundle.

This isn’t about me being anti-bolt and a return to the bolt wars of the last century. I’m actually a big fan. However, the bolting of climbing routes is technically illegal under the Canada National Parks Act and no climbing management plan exists for Banff National Park (bnp). Other concerns which arise from new route development are the environmental harm caused by trails being cut, trail erosion, impacts on vegetation, human waste, litter, parking, fire hazards and human-wildlife conflict.

This isn’t about stopping climbers from putting up new routes. Canada was shaped by a Company of Adventurers (the Hudson’s Bay Company). Adventure and exploration are in our dna.

The first adventurers in Banff were from Stoney Nakoda First Nations. After the national park was created in 1885,

the Canadian Pacific Railway hired Swiss guides like Edward Feuz and the Alpine Club of Canada hired Conrad Kain to take people up mountains. Later it was guides like Walter Perren and Hans Gmoser and iconoclastic climbers like Brian Greenwood and Barry Blanchard, who were leading the way. Peaks were many and climbers were few. Environmental impact and conf lict were minimal.

What’s different now, though, is that the hills aren’t alive with the sound of music but of drills, crowded crags, lineups on popular routes, more accidents requiring more rescues and increased environmental degradation.

Will this increased activity compel park planners and the climbing community to cross the Rubicon and change the ways route development and climbing is regulated in national parks?

Before everyone gets their knickers in a knot acclaiming their unfettered right to climb, just know that Banff has never been an unregulated playground where climbers were free to do whatever they wanted. Ever since the park was created, there were laws on the books, mostly unenforced, to safeguard and protect the environment. Equally important is that it’s almost as if there was a code among the climbing community to respect the land and one another while the boundaries were pushed of what people thought was possible.

Climbing’s popularity has exploded with it having moved from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream. Climbers and planners can maintain the status quo and try to hold onto the halcyon days and wonder years of the past, but that approach is about as effective of trying to hold back the tide. With the ties that historically bound the climbing community being frayed due to it becoming fashionable, bnp needs to step up and actually manage it. The Canada National Parks Act gives parks the authority to manage climbing.

This isn’t to suggest that reprobate climbers be arrested and charged with breaches under the act for placing a bolt but to instead offer guidance on how routes and their accompanying trails should be developed. It’s less about enforcement than education and compliance.

This makes some people uncomfortable. Some climbers will complain that their freedom is being taken away. Yosemite National Park, the birthplace of American climbing, quotes the inf luential Royal Robbins in the introduction to its regulations. Robbins wrote: “Most climbers are individuals who love freedom – they climb because it makes them feel free. We may expect then, that having others suggest how they ought to climb will rub wrong.” He wrote that in 1977. Those words ring as true today as they did 43 years ago.

Others will be grateful for the clarity and

certainty that a regulatory regime would offer instead of not knowing if what they’re doing is right. bnp staff will say that it’s unrealistic. Notwithstanding that bolting is technically illegal, change is inevitable and it’s preferable that bnp and the climbing community stay ahead of the curve rather than being behind the eight-ball.

Bnp planners and wardens are straining under the weight of being underresourced and are busy dealing with other urgent matters. These include accounting for the park sitting in the Treaty 6, 7 and 8 territories and the Métis Nation of Alberta. They ref lect Indigenous histories, languages, cultures and perspectives throughout the park, manage bear-human conflict and a decimated wolf population, and manage growth at Sunshine Village ski resort. The reality is that this makes the feasibility of advancing a climbing management plan like pushing a rope uphill, but it can be done.

An alternative approach would be for bnp to appreciate that they can’t hold back the tide of change and that other jurisdictions, including Alberta Parks and BC Parks, have already begun to go down the path of partnerships between land managers and the outdoor community. bnp

could bring in climbers from the cold and together build a climbing stewardship program. They could divorce themselves from hundred-year-old legislation, or redefine the relationship through regulation, and reimagine how climbing is managed in the 21st century.

I think it’s possible to find the right balance between a billion bolted routes and its resultant environmental damage, such as Yosemite’s practice of only allowing hand drilling bolts. Even more foreboding is what’s happening in North Cascades National Park, where there’s a moratorium on bolting, which, in 2012, led to rangers chopping hand-drilled bolt anchors on a descent route on Forbidden Peak, which likely contributed two years later to the death of a climber who couldn’t then take the more solid and safer descent route.

Admittedly, adding more routes spreads climbers out, reduces overcrowding and dilutes the environmental damage caused by climbers concentrated around popular routes. That’s not the point, though. It’s about moving away from the days of the wild west where anything goes and toward a rational rather than haphazard approach to route development.

Better to be the hammer rather than the nail, I say, and be part of the solution rather than the problem. The intent of this piece isn’t to advance specific rules, but to promote a conversation. William L. Watkinson once said, “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” Let’s turn on our headlamps and talk about this.

Jon Heshka is a professor in adventure studies

and law at Thomson Rivers University.