Yosemite climbers who camp overnight need permit
Yosemite’s surging popularity among rock climbers is forcing some changes.
On Friday, the national park announced it is launching a 2year pilot program requiring climbers who plan to camp overnight on the park’s famous big walls, including Half Dome and El Capitan, to obtain wilderness permits in advance. The program begins May 21.
The new protocol is another major shift at Yosemite as the park attempts to more closely manage the record numbers of visitors it has seen in the past decade and to limit their impacts. Last month, the park reintroduced a reservation system for day visitors first rolled out last year during the early months of the pandemic to help thin crowds in Yosemite Valley. The park also stopped issuing wilderness permits to walkin backpackers this year.
Yosemite is the world’s climbing mecca, a historic proving ground for the sport’s elite for 70 years. But climbing has become more mainstream, and scores of climbers are flocking to the park following recent highprofile ascents. Alex Honnold’s
ropeless climb of El Capitan in 2017, captured in the Oscarwinning documentary “Free Solo,” helped vault big-wall activity in Yosemite to unprecedented popularity.
“There’s a lot more use,” Yosemite park ranger Jamie Richards said. “But we have no way to know how many people actually participate in this activity, so this is to help the Park Service get a better understanding of how many people are coming, how many are up on the walls at any given time and how long they’re up there.”
Ultimately, the park hopes to better address issues associated with crowds, like litter, human waste and other impacts to the famous granite walls.
There are roughly 5,000 climbing routes in the park, and many can be completed in a single day. But multipitch routes to the top of the park’s soaring granite cliffs, like the 3,000foot El Capitan, can take days, sometimes weeks. For those larger projects, climbers haul up supplies and gear that allow them to camp overnight from dangling tents, called portal-edges.
Cleanup efforts organized by climbers, culminating in the annual Yosemite Facelift event each fall, have removed thousands of pounds of trash — food containers, water bottles and discarded climbing gear — from walls and climbing areas in recent years. But the issue continues to plague the park, Richards said.
“Our climbing rangers clean up hundreds of pounds of trash and abandoned gear off all of the major climbing routes every year,” she said. “Improper management of human waste is a major issue and something we’re working to address with this program,” she added.
In the hours after the announcement Friday morning, climbers discussed the new rule on social media. Many expressed anxiety that it signified more restrictions to come in the future. In a Reddit thread, one commenter wondered how the advance permit system would affect safety in a sport that is weatherdependent.
“There will be a lot of people who don’t like it, but I think this was inevitable,” given how popular climbing has become, said Ken Yager, president of the Yosemite Climbing Association, which organizes the annual Facelift event.
Yager said he’d like to see better communication between climbers and park staffers in general and thinks greater involvement from the park could help thin crowds at popular crags and improve the climbing experience overall.
“I’m trying to look on the bright side,” Yager said. “There are any number of ways this could help the climbing community.”
The new program doesn’t come with quotas or fees for climbers.
“The Park Service has gone to pretty great lengths to accommodate climbers and not to change the climbing experience,” said Chris Winters, executive director of the Access Fund, a nonprofit devoted to opening and protecting climbing areas.
Tommy Caldwell, an elite Yosemite bigwall climber and prominent voice in the community, expressed some concern about the possibility of tighter regulations on climbing.
“We’ve been privileged to be able to use these places freely,” Caldwell told The Chronicle. “I’d like to hold onto that and make sure the barrier to entry stays low in terms of costs and restrictions.”
But Caldwell acknowledged that crowding and litter has perhaps become too prevalent for the park to ignore.
“My hope is that this will help create a culture of respect and cleanliness and take climbers one step further in terms of caring for these places,” he said.